Those Leftover Gourmet Meals on Set? This Group Gives Them to the Hungry

It’s a cloudy evening outside an unassuming office building in Valencia, California, and only a smattering of trailers and security personnel suggest that something may be happening behind closed doors.

A white Toyota pulls into the parking lot, but it won’t be there for long. Nearly as soon as Arun Goswami opens his car door, an employee hands him a large rectangular black bag, which he deposits in his trunk. Goswami is heading to the homeless shelter Bridge to Home, a 15-minute drive away in Santa Clarita, with 40-plus gourmet meals, straight from the set of NCIS.

It’s all in a day’s work for Every Day Action, a food recovery nonprofit that diverts the excesses of the entertainment industry to help assuage hunger and homelessness in Los Angeles. The 5-year-old organization gathers uneaten first-rate catering from film and TV sets that would otherwise get tossed and delivers the meals to food pantries, shelters, nonprofits and low-income housing.

The organization was founded by two assistant directors who were bothered by the extent of food waste in the business. “It was a really gross secret in Hollywood,” says Samantha Luu, who recalls seeing major productions throwing “beautiful steak and salmon” away in front of the homeless in downtown L.A. She was told for years that, due to liability concerns, the unconsumed food could not be donated.

Luu met a like-minded friend on the set of NCIS: Los Angeles in fellow Directors Guild of America member Hillary Cohen. After the COVID-19 pandemic shut their show down in 2020, they decided to take action. “We knew how to handle safety because it’s our job on sets. We knew how studios would be with liability and we knew a contract needed to be drawn up. So that’s what we did,” Luu says.

Here’s how it works: Productions provide the nonprofit with their call sheets. Drivers discreetly arrive on sets at scheduled times, quickly pick up food donations and transport them to a donation site that’s often close to the set (frequent beneficiaries include the Hollywood Food Coalition, Youth Emerging Stronger, New Direction for Veterans and the Hollywood Arts Collective). Every Day Action assumes liability for the food by signing a donation agreement with the studio, show or production company.

Today, the organization’s “reallocators,” like Goswami, regularly cover an area that ranges from Santa Clarita to San Pedro; in special circumstances, they may go farther afield. In 2024, Every Day Action delivered roughly 90,000 meals by its own count, up 30,000 from its first three years.

Still, at a time when production in Los Angeles is slowing, the organization is feeling the pinch. Cohen and Luu have long hired background actors and production assistants who are between jobs as their drivers. Their Every Day Action pay is modest: $100 a day. But as job opportunities have dried up in the past few years, this gig — intended to be a backstop for some of the industry’s lowest-paid workers — has been increasingly in demand. During the 2023 writers and actors strikes, Cohen and Luu expanded driver eligibility to include anyone in the industry. “The roster list is never-ending,” Cohen says.

Every Day Action has felt the industry contraction in other ways, too. There was a time when the nonprofit serviced 15 shows at once; now they have six. But even if the trend continues, Cohen notes wryly, “There’s always food waste. So we are always going to exist.” Every Day Action has expanded its work beyond sets into corporate offices, grocery stores, food festivals and awards shows. Cohen has also noticed a recent uptick in independent films and commercials that work with the organization.

Still, for now, there is glorious set catering to share. At Bridge to Home in Santa Clarita, Goswami unzips the bag of meals from NCIS. Inside are more than two dozen containers filled with noodles, rice, bok choy and curry. “That’s panang,” he says, pointing to one container; the chef “makes such great food.”

Goswami is very familiar with the caterer. For years, he worked as a background actor on NCIS: Los Angeles, which contracted with the same food provider, followed by stints in craft services and in the camera department before leaving the show. Now, he does two to six runs a day for Every Day Action, usually visiting NCIS daily, as he considers going back to school, potentially to study finance. 

On the job, Goswami says he sees the kind of food that “you would be willing to serve a millionaire” — cordon bleu, barley salad, quinoa. It’s validating for him to take part in sharing the largesse he is so familiar with. He says, “Everyone deserves a nice meal.”

This story appears in the April 2025 Sustainability digital issue of The Hollywood Reporter magazine. Click here to see the rest of the issue.