Fight2Feed Rescues Food to Feed Those in Need

Get more recipes, food news, and stories at wttw.com/food or by signing up for our Deep Dish newsletter. 
Have a food story or recommendation? Email us at [email protected].

Ever wondered what happens to food at the supermarket after its expiration date? Date-labeling has various aims, and many of the dates printed on food packaging are not “safety” dates, according to the USDA, meaning food can be safely consumed after them. So those packages of cookies on the brink of their sell-by date and dented cans of soup past their “best if used by” date aren’t just  tossed in the dumpster. Some of that food gets rescued by organizations like Chicago’s Fight2Feed, which rescued over 100 tons of food and distributed over 150,000 plates of food in 2024, according to the organization – numbers which they expect to double in 2025.

Fight2Feed partners with dozens of Chicago area food organizations to bring in food and send out meals from a large kitchen space at McCormick Place donated by the convention center in 2021. Volunteers do everything from unpacking and sorting inventory, food prep, pantry organization, and cleaning to unloading rescued food and loading prepped meals onto trucks. Once delivered, the items get sorted, cooked, packed, and sent back out to those in need. Chicago police officers pick up boxed meals to distribute to unhoused folks on the streets on their beats, and meals get donated regularly to organizations like Generations Housing Initiative, Cornerstone Community Outreach, or Chi-Care. Every month the team prepares a four-course lunch for seniors at Little Brothers Friends of the Elderly, another longtime partner, at a social event to mark their birthdays.

Misfits Market is an online grocer and Fight2Feed supply partner.

“We rescue high-quality food that’s perfectly delicious but may otherwise have gone to waste because it’s excess supply, has packaging errors, or just looks a little different,” says Holly Eagleson, Misfits’ senior vice president of brand marketing – fresh food such as berries, citrus, grapes, or salad kits “We donate whatever produce items are available that week after we pack boxes for our customers in an effort to minimize all waste in our facilities and help people facing hunger in our communities. ”

Sometimes Misfits donates non-produce items that are close to their “best by” date. This date, which indicates an item’s optimal freshness according to its manufacturer, “can be somewhat arbitrary,” according to Eagleson, and “items close to their best by date are still perfectly fine to eat.”

Jiwon McCartney is a Chicago entrepreneur who worked in corporate hospitality before helping to launch Fight2Feed in 2014 to fulfill her passion for service to her community, reducing food waste, and helping those in need. She remains in the trenches, cooking and packing meals. “On a typical Wednesday, we’ll get in here at 7:00 am to get set up, then cook 500 meals. There’s usually about six of us, but when we get volunteers we get lucky, so maybe 20 of us,” she says. The team cooks, packs and builds boxes, organizes the pantry, and preps and freezes excess product. After all that, “we break bread together, because at the end there’s always a family meal,” says McCartney.

Fight2Feed’s kitchen at McCormick Place is ideally located to rescue the food for the largest food show of the year. As the donation recipient of the National Restaurant Association show at McCormick Place for the fourth year in a row, McCartney and her team need “an army” of volunteers to help sort this surplus food to share with Chicago’s communities in need. “Once the booths are down, I need 150 volunteers to go through the show floor,” she says, picking up excess samples and bringing them back to the kitchen to sort.

Fight2Feed has another volunteer group whose members don’t even leave their own kitchens. The group, Bake Squad, started during the pandemic, when folks didn’t want to leave the house. “It’s people that want to bake cookies,” says McCartney, “so we get to put home-baked treats into all of our meals.”

The volunteers at Fight2Feed come away with a little experience in food service, and a lot of pride. Says McCartney, “We learn from each other, and you might be able to teach somebody something they didn’t know, because your path is on a different angle. We end up becoming a family.”

Those interested in volunteering after the National Restaurant Association show on May 20 and 21 can sign up here. Bakers who want to join the bake squad can sign up to make and drop off 100 cookies – just be sure to leave out the nuts.