Pizza Hut was the first U.S. chain to donate meals nationwide, and now parent company Yum! Brands is using its years of experience to ensure that excess food ends up on plates and not in landfills.
Yum! Brands
NORTHAMPTON, MA / ACCESSWIRE / August 13, 2024 / Somewhere in Poland, a notification is sent from the brand’s app. The customer who ordered the large pepperoni pizza with stuffed crust wants a thin crust pizza instead. At KFC in Brazil, the lunch rush is over and a few Original Recipe chickens are still unsold. Situations like this happen in restaurants all over the world.
This excess food presents an opportunity for Yum! Brands. As the world’s largest restaurant company and parent company of KFC, Taco Bell, Pizza Hut and The Habit Burger Grill, Yum! and its brands’ franchisees are uniquely positioned to donate unused produce to food banks and charities around the world. This not only provides food to those in need, but also keeps food out of landfills, reducing carbon emissions.
“We’re helping to solve hunger issues in diverse markets and impact climate change. It’s rewarding work,” said Maria Echeverri, KFC’s head of food donations for Latin America and the Caribbean. “And we’re proud of the progress we’ve made. Since Yum! Harvest launched in 1992, the company has donated over 215 million pounds of food to more than 5,000 charity partners in over 25 countries, the equivalent of diverting over 19 million bags of trash from landfills. But we know there’s more work to be done.”
Harvest, which Echeverri mentioned, is run by Food Donation Connection (FDC). It began in 1992 and was the only such program in the United States at the time, making Pizza Hut the first national chain to donate its excess food. Bill Reighard, a former Pizza Hut/PepsiCo executive who left the company, founded FDC, and the company now partners with other restaurant chains. They include KFC, which started its Harvest program in the United States in 1999 and calls 2024 the 25th year of its partnership.th Anniversary.
Harvest also works as a tool for employee retention. In Trinidad and Tobago, one of KFC’s busiest markets, franchisee Roger Rambharose, vice president of Prestige Holdings Limited, saw the program as an opportunity to connect with his Gen Z team members who were looking for meaning in their work. So his team identified seven local charities and designed a weekly collection process. They purchased a refrigerated truck to haul away the excess food in the hot Caribbean weather and printed the vehicle with a Harvest message to visually alert the community to the program. It was so successful that Rambharose saw an immediate increase in employee retention (watch him talk about it in the video above).
Another success story is in the UK, where KFC and its franchisees donate their surplus food through Fareshare, the country’s largest food redistribution program. Since partnering with Fareshare in 2021, food donations have increased by two-thirds, with 1 million meals provided over the past three years and a goal of 2 million meals by the end of 2024.
“Around half of our restaurants currently donate their surplus chicken,” said Louise Norris, manager of the KFC Foundation in the UK and Ireland (UKI). “We work every day to increase this amount and have run some pretty fun campaigns, such as a community kitchen where influencers created recipes using leftover KFC chicken. We want to show our customers that they too can put food on plates instead of sending it to landfill.”
Even Yum!’s test kitchens send unused produce to those in need. Taco Bell donates excess food from its corporate headquarters in Irvine, California, and its distribution centers. In Plano, Texas, Jennifer Gilara, who was once a general manager at Pizza Hut before leading the test kitchen, donated 6,000 pounds of food to a local homeless shelter in 2023. She has set a goal to double that number this year.
“As the world’s largest restaurant company, we have the power to make a big difference and lead the way in food donations,” said Gilara. “I’m so grateful that we’ve found a solution that has the potential to work in each of our markets and provide food to people in our communities.”
Whether it’s Harvest through FDC, food donations through FareShare or another organization, or a direct donation, Yum! Brands will continue to feed those in need, reduce greenhouse gas emissions, and provide Team Members with a sense of purpose.
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SOURCE: Yum! Brands
