Food Recovery Initiative

The Office of Food Justice developed a Food Recovery Assessment to evaluate the food recovery landscape in Boston and help identify interventions to scale food recovery, increase responsiveness to community needs and reduce wastage of surplus food. We engaged community members and food access and food recovery organizations, along with businesses that generate food waste, to shape the report’s findings. The assessment recommends strategies the City can pursue to enhance food recovery efforts, ensuring surplus, safe-to-eat, and nutritious food is redistributed rather than entering the waste stream. Together with our partners, OFJ is excited to move forward recommendations from the report over the coming years.

• View full report
• View webinar of assessment findings and recommendations in English
• View webinar of assessment findings and recommendations in Spanish

The Office of Food Justice is awarding Healthy Food Access through Cold Storage grants in fall 2024 to enable the storage and distribution of perishable food, including recovered and donated food. Cold storage has emerged as a lynchpin to increasing access to fresh foods, especially fruits and vegetables. Lack of refrigeration is a key roadblock to increasing access to recovered food that safely meets the health code and extends shelf life. Funding cold storage will help increase the volume of food that is eaten instead of wasted, will help reduce greenhouse gas emissions from food going to landfills or incinerated and will also better the availability of culturally relevant foods. The grant's purpose is to fund strategies that expand refrigeration and freezer space throughout the cold chain to ensure food is fresh, safe and available to residents.

The grant application is now closed.