Where Surplus Meets Sustenance

365 days a year, in the gap between a grocery store’s back door and a family’s kitchen table, ExtraFood is working. Each year, the Bay Area-based nonprofit rescues more than five million pounds of fresh, surplus food from farmers markets, grocery stores, caterers, hospitals, schools, backyards, and farms and delivers it, often within hours, to more than 400 nonprofit partners serving 50,000 people a week from Sonoma to San Mateo counties.

“The role that we are playing is as a safety net provider,” says CEO Will Dittmar, “arguably as critical as it has ever been as we look around the state of food security and the needs of at-risk communities. We are a last line of defense against hunger.” With SNAP benefits shrinking and grocery costs climbing, “People are trying to do more with less every single day,” Dittmar says. 

Founded in 2013, ExtraFood has grown from a local food recovery organization into a broader Bay Area movement. In 2023, ExtraFood merged with San Francisco Food Runners, founded in the late 1980s by chef Mary Risley, known as the “Godmother of food recovery.” The merger expanded ExtraFood’s reach and strengthened its ability to rescue more surplus food and get it to more people who need it.

Nationally, more than a third of all food goes to waste, and rotting food is a major source of methane, one of the most potent greenhouse gases. “Even if you’re not food insecure, supporting food recovery benefits you,” Dittmar says, since every rescued pound also saves the water, land, and labor spent producing it. ExtraFood has kept nearly two million pounds of methane out of the atmosphere.

Bringing Food to the Table to Those in Need

ExtraFood is not a food bank. “We don’t store or buy food, we connect surplus food with people who need it,” explains Director of Marketing Mandy Willian. A call to ExtraFood means about 12,000 pounds of fresh salmon can go from dispatch to dinner tables that evening, thanks to a database that automates 85 percent of rescues and a fleet of refrigerated trucks staffed by drivers and 435 volunteers.

“It’s the same food, same quality that I buy in the grocery store,” says COO Cherie Graham. Quality control is strict; spoiled food is refused.

Even more importantly, behind the pounds are the people. Dittmar recalls Jane, a 60-year-old former professional who lost her job, then her savings, and now relies on ExtraFood weekly: “She has us in her corner each and every day.” Willian remembers an after-school program in East San Rafael, where low-income kids ran out to meet her SUV and each got to take home food for their family. Graham recalls a high schooler who quietly saved his free school lunch each day to feed his younger siblings at home.

Nearly a third of ExtraFood’s recipients are low-income seniors, even in wealthy Marin. Its volunteer corps, Dittmar notes, increasingly includes people from the communities it serves, proof, he says, that food recovery “becomes a way of life.”