Susan and Emily from Columbus Food Rescue came on the Green Champions podcast last year, and I walked away from that conversation wondering why more problems aren’t solved this way.
They built a system where volunteers drive food from places that would throw it away to people who need it. Connecting dots that were already there.
What struck me wasn’t the logistics, though those are impressive. It was the energy they brought. Not the manufactured enthusiasm of a pitch deck, but something steadier. The kind of presence that comes from knowing exactly why your work matters.
In entrepreneurship, I’ve seen this quality before. It shows up in founders who have stopped trying to prove something and started simply doing the thing that needs doing. There’s an ease to it. A groundedness. You can feel it in the way they talk, in the patience behind their answers.
Emily and Susan have that.
They manage over 200 weekly food pickups across Columbus. Restaurants, farmer’s markets, hospitals, conference centers, bakeries. Each one matched to a receiving site, whether that’s a pantry, a shelter, or supportive housing. Volunteers sign up through an app, grab a route, and become the bridge between excess and need.
Once or twice a month, they coordinate something larger. Nine pallets of citrus rejected by a food bank because of minor spoilage. A restaurant closing its doors with inventory still in the walk-in. Food that would otherwise disappear into the waste stream, rerouted toward someone’s dinner table.
The numbers are staggering when you sit with them. Columbus Food Rescue moves about a million pounds of food each year. The Franklin County landfill receives nearly a million pounds of food waste every single day. Their entire year of work offsets roughly one day of what gets thrown away.
That ratio could be demoralizing. Instead, Susan frames it as an invitation. The scale of the problem is the scale of the opportunity.
And here’s what I keep thinking about: this isn’t a technology breakthrough. It isn’t a new invention. It’s coordination. It’s noticing that the food exists, the need exists, and the only missing piece is someone willing to be the connection between them.
I was so moved by that conversation that I signed up to volunteer.
I’ve only done a few rescues so far, but each one has been quietly remarkable. Pulling up to Fox in the Snow, my favorite bakery, and loading pastries and bread that didn’t sell. Picking up trays from a conference venue where the event ended early. Driving it across town to a place where people are waiting for exactly this.
There’s a specific kind of joy in it. Not the satisfaction of building something from scratch, but the simpler pleasure of making sure good things reach the people who can use them. It feels like a small miracle every time, this little loop of connection where nothing is wasted and everyone is fed.
What Susan said in the interview has stayed with me. She doesn’t talk about the work as service in the traditional sense. She talks about it as working alongside people. Not doing something for the community, but participating in it. When people have food, when they’re treated with dignity, the whole community becomes stronger. Food isn’t separate from education, from employment, from the ability to show up and contribute. It’s the foundation underneath all of it.
Emily put it more directly. Access to food is a human right. Not a reward for effort or a measure of someone’s worth. Just a baseline. A starting point for everything else.
I think about this framing often when I’m working with founders. So many of the problems we try to solve are connection problems. The gap between what exists and what’s needed. The distance between someone with a resource and someone who could use it.
We often assume we need to invent something new. Build something proprietary. Create value from nothing.
But sometimes the most meaningful work is simpler than that. It’s seeing what’s already there. Recognizing where the dots are waiting to be connected. And then showing up, consistently, to do the connecting.
Susan and Emily didn’t invent food rescue. They just committed to making it work in Columbus, week after week, pickup after pickup. Two hundred routes. Seventy-five donors. A hundred receiving sites. One city, fed a little differently because two people decided to keep showing up.
If you’re in Columbus and have a little spare time, they’re always looking for drivers. You can sign up at local-matters.org under the Columbus Food Rescue tab. One shift, maybe thirty minutes. Enough to move food that would have been wasted into the hands of someone who needs it.
Sometimes the work that matters most isn’t inventing something new. It’s bridging what’s already there.