Working Groups

The Cooperative Distribution Group brings together a small network of local partners including Good Neighbors, One More Child, Meals on Wheels Plus, Parrish United Methodist and St. Joseph’s food pantry, who meet regularly to coordinate food recovery and distribution across Manatee County.

By working together, these organizations are able to re-recover food that might otherwise go to waste, share resources more efficiently, and get food to residents faster. Since launching, the group has redistributed over 300,000 pounds of food among its members.

Member organizations:

• Good Neighbors
• Meals on Wheels Plus of Manatee
• One More Child
• Parrish United Methodist
• St. Joseph's Pantry

The Problem: An estimated 30–40% of the U.S. food supply goes to waste, often after it has already been picked, packed, and shipped. When a load is rejected at the receiving dock—for a dented case, a missed delivery window, or a paperwork mismatch—the driver has hours, not days, to find this perfectly edible food a new home. Most drivers have no easy way to reach a nonprofit, no time to call around, and no visibility into who needs what. The food is landfilled, and both the driver and the shipper absorb the loss. This in-transit stage of the supply chain remains one of the least tracked and least understood sources of food loss nationally–one that can be leveraged to support food security efforts.

The solution co-designed by FoodRecovery.org and Epic-Cure: RescueRoute lets a driver post a rejected load as a donation directly from the cab in minutes. The app uses OCR to read load details from a scanned bill of lading, finds nearby nonprofits within the driver's chosen delivery radius, and notifies subscribed nonprofits by push, email, or SMS the instant a donation is posted. Both parties confirm the handoff in-app, generating a documented, verified donation record for the donor's tax deduction and ESG reporting, and unprecedented data on an unmapped category of in-transit food loss.

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