L.A. County Offers Hospitals Food-pickup Service
Food recovery service Copia helps hospitals with food pickups that feed hungry neighbors by delivering surpluses to local partners.
Los Angeles County this month offers a bonus for hospitals — year-long memberships to the Copia food recovery service. The first 50 organizations that respond can use the service at no cost for the next 12 months.
Participating organizations call for pickups whenever surplus food is generated by kitchens. Donations are delivered to participating nonprofits working to eliminate food insecurity across California and the country.
Hospitals are now the biggest donors of food after retail food stores, Copia spokesperson Paige Sullivan told HASC Briefs.
More than three times the food needed to feed Americans is produced in the U.S. annually, Copia’s Kimberly Smith told HASC members in a Jan. 28 webinar presented by Communities Lifting Communities, HASC’s community health improvement initiative.
“Hunger is not a scarcity issue, it is rather a logistics issue,” Smith explained. “Hospitals are playing a big role now because you are one of the few institutions continuing to produce food during the pandemic.”
Sharing food via Copia or similar services offers multiple advantages. Not only does it reduce the need for disposal and improve carbon-offset scores, it helps facilities comply with SB-1383 — which mandates a 75-percent reduction in organic waste by 2025.
And for hospitals it meets a higher goal as well by addressing food insecurity, a critical social determinant of health for hundreds of thousands of residents across the region.
Additional Los Angeles County hospitals and organizations are now welcome to join the program, said Bernadet Garcia-Silva, who manages L.A. County Public Health’s nutrition and physical activity programs.
Facilities and organizations can enroll in the program through this link.
Those interested can learn more by viewing the Jan. 28 program webinar here.
With questions, please contact CLC Project Manager Karen Ochoa.
Contact:
Karen Ochoa
(213) 538-0765
kochoa@hasc.org