Eliza Blank — The Logistics of Saving Food: Inside The Farmlink Project [music] [music] Yeah, uh well welcome Eliza? Yes. Uh okay. Eliza uh to the show. A pleasure to have you on uh Pill Blue Nexus. This is going to take a different sort of angle from all the other episodes that I had, but it is of interest of mine like just uh agriculture and food and everything that goes along with that. And who better to have on than a person who created a house plant business, um took it to the next level, and now is running The Farm Link Project. Eliza, welcome to the show. Thank you for having me. I'm excited to talk about all things plants. [laughter] So exactly, and I love plants. I'm a gardener. I think I left this out on the last episode. So um so it's a it it's let's find a common ground here. Tell me what what uh what um did you like about plants to begin with? Like what made you want to create The Sill? Yeah. Yeah. Um well, great question. I started The Sill when I was 26, um which was quite some time ago. Um and uh that happened to be 2012. And at that time I was um coming out of brand strategy as a primary or initial career. And I was very interested in taking an entrepreneurial uh track. And I was very intrigued by house plants as a category, believe it or not. It was a personal experience that I had of, you know, being in one of my very first apartments and trying to decorate with plants and um you know, trying to make it feel more homey. And then come to find that there there a lot of places where I could go shop for plants that were going to be inspiring or convenient or educate me or kind of offer like anything that one might come to expect from shopping any other category. And so I decided to create a consumer brand surrounding plants that would do all those things that would be beautiful and educational and convenient. Um and so we started as a delivery service um that basically was in my neighborhood because if you ordered from the website I was going to be knocking on your door and handing you the product that you purchased. Um but we did blow up into a national brand. We were shipping nationally. We ended up having having um something like 12 stores in 10 different markets and um and now The Sill is a full-fledged uh online garden center. So you can buy not only house plants, which is the category we started with, but you can buy apple trees and hedges and all sorts of things and um and it was an amazing uh adventure and skill set that ultimately then led me to FarmLink. That's amazing. So you went from The Sill to like the field or the farm, right? It's interesting. right. That's great. I love that. [laughter] And um I get it. Like were you living in the city where you just uh needed a decoration for the sill, right? Like I I've I've been there. Like I I put the plants behind the blinds sometimes and sometimes you have to roll it up a little bit. So Right. And that's exactly right. Yeah. In fact, we I would have said, you know, whatever more than a decade ago that we specialized in like mini plants because everyone had mini sills and mini apartments and Yep. definitely um [snorts] you know, related to my stage in life and in some ways that's actually continues to be true. I graduated from it and I've moved on to the next chapter. Speaking of graduation, you mentioned that you were studying where were you studying? Um at NYU. So, I was living in a teeny tiny village apartment like the sixth floor of a walk-up just to paint a picture. Okay, that makes a lot of sense now. Yeah. Yeah, that's cool. How do how was your New York sort of experience going to school? That must have been awesome. It was. I mean, I grew up in Western Massachusetts which informs a lot of the decisions that I've made in my life in fact because I grew up in a very like agriculturally based community. You know, I passed a cow field on my way to high school and my high school was next to a vocational school which I feel like doesn't exist in the same way anymore as it used to. And so, going to the city was like the biggest contrast that like I could make for myself and I loved it. I lived in New York City for 20 years, but then ultimately left because I needed green grass again and I wanted to be closer to my food chain and I wanted to you know, um reconnect with nature. Talk about that move from the city to I would say the country, but you probably didn't go all the way in the country. Well, kind of. I live in the Catskills now which is pretty rural. My I live in a small Hamlet of about 3,000 people and I now again get to pass cows on the way to dropping my [laughter] kids off at school. But, I would say that what's nice about where I am versus Massachusetts is is the proximity to New York City. Is I can still get on a train and in under two hours be in the middle of Manhattan. So, Okay. It's a transition with you know, a bit of a tail. Yeah, so you are a country girl at heart. I think I am. Yeah. Yeah, I I can totally resonate with that and that's probably where your love of plants came in. so totally resonate with that. Um, talk about the Farm Link project. What is it? Yeah, so the Farm Link project is a national nonprofit. Um, we are in the food recovery space, and most people then say, "Well, what does that mean? " Um, we will recover surplus produce all along the supply chain before retail. Meaning, a lot of food recovery institutions might pick up food that's, you know, post expiration or on its way out from a grocery store. We collect food before it even gets to a store that would be considered surplus and therefore might go to waste, and we redistribute that into the charitable food system. And this all started as a grassroots movement during COVID uh by a a group of college students. Um, so you know, juniors and seniors in school got together after they'd been sent home from their jobs and sent home from their classes um to try and get involved and be helpful. And one of the things that they recognized was that their local food bank was really in need of fresh food. And meanwhile, there was all these farms who had lost their business because hospitality effectively shut down overnight and were forced to effectively plow under a lot of their perfectly good food. So these students started renting U-Hauls and cold calling farms uh and making that connection. And and then they came to realize that while that was somewhat unique to COVID in the pandemic, it is actually a pretty significant um breakdown in our supply chain. Which is to say that there are so many people in need and there is a tremendous amount of surplus food in this country, but to actually transport it, to both coordinate the transportation of perishable goods, and to pay for that transportation hasn't existed in a really material way. And that's where Farm Link has stepped in and and and and we've done so at at quite impressive scale. So in that first year, those college students moved 40 million pounds of food. And we are now moving Last year, we moved 150 million pounds of food, and that's about 100 full truckloads a week. Wow, so there's a really big business logistical problem here to make that happen, but it works. It works, and the crazy thing is is it's not actually all that complex. Uh I think that was what surprised me most when I joined was that actually coordinating and making this happen day-to-day is not the hardest thing. It's really for us, it's been forming the relationships over the past 6 years so that when the surplus arises, we know exactly who to call because we have maybe 24 to 48 hours to move the food. Right. And And talk about the process itself. What happens there? Like what How does that day look like or those few days look like? So, um relationships, as I mentioned, that's like our currency. Like we don't have We don't have assets as an organization. We don't have warehouse space. We don't own the trucks. Our relationships are what's most important. And so, if we have a thousand relationships spanning food donors to receiving agencies, whenever surplus arises, so again, we could have someone who failed to sell their load at the wholesale market one day or an importer um with the same type of situation or a farmer who lost a sales order. All of these types of situations can happen, and they do happen every single day across every single commodity. Um they know to call us, and then, you know, we have to consider who to call next. Um and that is a lot of decision-making that we have learned over the course of 6 years of doing this. Often times, it's closest proximity, right? Cuz we're also trying to be responsible about this food. It's also timing, um but it's also understanding receiving uh agency's capacity. Like who can actually take a truckload of food? Um who's going to absorb and distribute it in a timely manner based on what it is and how much shelf life it has left. Like moving potatoes is very different than moving bananas, as you can imagine. And where does this happen? Is this nationally or is this regional? So, most of our food in the United States that is grown here originates from California. Um pretty obvious. Um that being said, you know, you probably can appreciate like apples are grown all along the Northeast and citrus is grown, you know, in Florida. And so there is food and you know, and potatoes are the Northwest. So there is food being grown in all over the place and we can move food from anywhere to anywhere um at scale. We move exclusively full truck loads. And then we do a lot of work with um folks who are importing food um from Mexico or from Canada. Um so in fact, our reach is really, you know, all of North America to some extent. Interesting. Talk about the end result of all of this. Like how has this been received? Yeah. Uh yeah, talk talk about the success stories about what people feel about this. Well, look, this is like a massive opportunity because not only are we helping feed people, but this food would have otherwise gone to waste, which has a huge impact on our planet because food rotting in a landfill creates methane, which is not a greenhouse greenhouse gas that you want in our atmosphere. So, I would say it's a triple win because you know, we try and support farmers and we try and feed communities and it's very much healing to the planet. It's one of the best interventions actually to climate change is um diverting food waste. So, all to say like it's been it's been received quite well. Um and it's not to say that we invented food recovery or there's not an amazing ecosystem surrounding us because I I what we also recognize as an organization is that you don't do you don't do this work alone. Like we in fact are representation of partnership in action because all we're doing is coordinating. Like we're the connective tissue between existing groups. And so we very much depend on the great work of other organizations. But on the receiving end the impact is enormous. I mean we're talking about fresh food. You know, the charitable food system often relies on you know, packaged non-perishable oftentimes ultra-processed foods. So we're getting the most helpful the most fresh food into hands of those who are in need. And when we think about what's happening now just broadly speaking like you know, berries aren't cheap. Like I know [laughter] that. You have a kid, you know that. So it's also one of these items that um people get priced out of pretty quickly. Or um and and so we're very proud of the work that we do that we're able to focus in this very specific way on produce um and um pre-retail because it does guarantee freshness. Yeah, that's a great uh thing. Like most people they would if they're on the lower income, they would go to the canned foods and not get the fresh fresh stuff. Which is what you're trying to do or what you are doing is providing that level of access to to the people who can't uh afford it. That's right. Yeah. And and the volume is is in some ways hard to wrap your mind around. Um 115 million pounds is a lot. Um a common standard in the charitable food space is that 1.2 pounds is equivalent to a meal. Obviously a meal isn't just a bunch of apples, but uh it does just put things into perspective, you know, that we're producing you know, hunt you know, 100 what you know, 25 40 million meals out of that. And then when you think about servings, like the math just grows. And so, this is this is a material amount of food that we're getting to people's tables. Wow. And And how big is your network of food banks? Well, I would say we probably work with like 500 receiving agencies. Um when we talk about food banks in this country, oftentimes you think of Feeding America. They have 198 network food banks. But what a lot of people don't recognize is that there's also a lot of independent food banks, too. And we work with any We actually will work with any nonprofit willing to take a full truckload. So, like if you're if you have a very active church, we can come to your church parking lot and drop down a truckload of food. Um so, we we try and work with uh any organization who works with us. I'm interested technically how you handle the logistics of all of this. Like Is there a spreadsheet somewhere or [laughter] Yeah, no. Well, I mean, what's also very exciting for me, having just joined the Farmlink Project, is like we're in an era that is never been seen before. And so, actually we can start to use technology in ways that even 6 months ago um we weren't able to. So, in fact, we are building um a a database now that pulls a lot of the manual work um out of people's brains and will make it a lot faster to surface data and information and make decisions. And so, we're very excited about applying tools like LLMs and just AI in general to the work that we're doing because a lot of what we do is just communication. And some of that needs to have human intervention and judgment, of course, and some of it just doesn't. And so, we are again entering a moment in time where efficiency is going to be um achievable in ways that it just wasn't before. Oh, wow. Now that you mentioned that, I can totally see how AI can help here Um from a a logistical point of view, administrative point of view. Absolutely. It's all data and we know that there's lots of value in data and sometimes you don't even know until you have it in front of you what questions to ask but you know a lot of what we do is just is just trying to understand one um who are all the agencies to begin with, what is their where are they, what is their capacity, when are they open, um what kind of foods are culturally relevant to them, Interesting. there's only so many spreadsheets and pivot tables you can create to like really get value out of that information. So for us being able to create a database is actually going to be um instrumental in being able to move food, move it effectively and what we hope is that it'll also continue to help us unlock supply because I think there's a lot of untapped supply as well in this country and a lot of hesitation about untapping it because of the coordination effort to then distribute it. Is there um the untapped area is does that include restaurants? For us we look at farms because a lot of what gets wasted is unfortunately left in the field. Okay. Farmers already have this incredible burden of trying to turn a profit on what they do sell. It is impossible to ask them to pay for the harvest and packaging of food that they have not sold and yet there's billions of pounds of food left in the field every single year. So your your organization is in the sort of harvesting, collecting and then processing it to a point where it's edible. Well, we hope to continue to do what we call pre-harvest recovery work which is more expensive than moving food that's already been harvested but it is plentiful and it is there and if we can do that in a way that both supports farmers and can feed people that is a very large untapped opportunity. And to say, you know, process yes, but you don't even have to process it necessarily. It's just a matter of timing of getting it out of the field and distributed to people in in the time that they can consume. Right. Yeah, there's like you said 48 hours but uh it there there there is really a time crunch going on, isn't there? Like all the time to to to get it to the to to the right spot. Mhm. Yeah, we've we've seen this so a lot of there's a lot of actual uh news attention right now on the peach trees in California and it's a really devastating uh challenge that these farmers have had because Del Monte declared bankruptcy last year and Del Monte's a big canning company and a lot of that is just reflective of like consumer behavior changing. Like people aren't eating canned peaches anymore. Which is just and canned pears for that matter. And so we saw this last year immediately with pears actually. We we worked on um some harvesting of pears because Del Monte canning facility closed and there was a farm in the Northwest that literally was just then sitting on hundreds of thousands of pears were already harvested um and meant to go to this canning facility and then the canning facility like closed, you know, and then and then what? And so all you all of a sudden you have you know, all of these pears ready to go and nowhere to go and yet you have 48 million food insecure Americans. And that in the instance of the peaches because they've now determined that there's less of a market for these types of peaches, the state of California is actually paying the farmers to dig up the peach trees and replace it with crops that are more um viable in the market. And so now we're seeing the destruction of all these incredible peach trees, um which is just, you know, quite sad. And yet, you know, we do what we can in terms of rescuing. But, you know, we're up against big forces that, you know, put us in these positions. So, the demand for people for canned stuff has gone down. That's interesting. I'm wondering if it had anything to do with uh the pricing or alternatives. So, like if you guys got into the canning industry, for example, right? Like would you make a profit there? Yeah. Well, you know, I'm not an economist and it's so easy to, you know, to make these assumptions about why things are the way they are. But, of course, what I've come to learn in being in this organization is there's so many factors that go into this. Like, I'm sure like the price of aluminum going up has something to do with it. Sure, changing consumer sentiment and diets has something to do with it. And I, you know, there's it's all the things, right? So, um it's it's hard to pinpoint like what the one thing is, but what I think about in terms of FarmLink especially is we have pinpointed this one intervention that we know does work and that there are many more, as I mentioned earlier. Like, this is all about the bigger ecosystem and relationships. And um and that's what's really exciting is that I think as we continue to evolve and adopt technology and create efficiencies, we will also be able to develop new interventions for some of this work because it's not going to just be one thing. That's interesting. Very interesting. So, you there's a ton of challenges and a ton of problems here and that you probably see every day. Um so, how how do you guys get funded? So, um we get funded because of amazing donors. Um we have corporate partnerships. We get funded by foundations through grants. Um and then individuals. So, you can go to our website and donate five bucks. You can be someone who's able to write a bigger check than that. But, right now it's uh 100% uh philanthropy. Um we don't have an earned revenue stream. Um that is something that we are, you know, continuing to hold curiosity around, but um we've been very lucky that there's a lot of people who believe in the work that we're doing in this particular intervention. And again, as I mentioned, you know, you can be interested in um food insecurity, you could be interested in waste production, you could be interested in um the American farmer, or you could be interested in climate. Um all of those things intersect in the work that Farm Link does, and so I think we've been really lucky to attract a lot of different donors who are motivated by different things. You probably have a bigger perspective than I do here, but tell me I do live in a country area, so I have farmers around me. But, talk talk to me about farmers and farming as a profession as it is today. And is it making a comeback? Is people talk about Amish rock and plumbing? No. I mean, may you know, there we see all this Instagram content and, you know, tradwives are becoming a thing and people, you know, want to homestead, but the reality is is that farmers in America are getting crushed, and there's very little ability to have solid succession planning because it's just a very hard way to make a living. All of the costs are going up. Um so, cost of machinery and cost of fertilizer, the cost to get into farming. It's an enormous hurdle. You know, if you're a 22-year-old coming out of college and you're like, "Well, I could start a website for free, or I could start a farm for hundreds of thousands of dollars. " You know, which is it going to be? And so, unfortunately, um I think we're finding that we are in a position that we are not supporting our farmers enough, um which obviously puts our food at risk. Mhm. Three. Um we rely a lot on importing our food and instead we reward a lot of the big consolidated farmer ops that you know don't actually really make food. They're making inputs, you know, they're making um ethanol or animal feed or you know other things. So I think it's really tough to be a farmer right now and you know we could spend an entire hour just talking about that but that's why I say you know it's really not up to the farmer to um put in the extra overhead to harvest this food to donate it cuz they're already in a place. And what what are the demographics of the farming industry? Are they mostly mom and pop shops, family businesses or are they more corporatized now? They are more corporatized now. There's a lot of consolidation that has taken place over the past couple generations. Um I can't speak to it fluently other than what I would recommend for you is you read the farm bill a citizen's guide to the farm bill which is a great book that breaks it all down for you to understand kind of how we even got to where we are today and it has to do with a lot of incentives and programs put in place and obviously the farm bill has evolved over a hundred plus years but a lot of a lot of what goes on starts from the very top. This is kind of like one of those things like my my father-in-law talks a lot about like he's in the trucking industry and it's like everything that's you you touch was brought to you by a truck but people don't people don't think about that but also people don't think about where their food comes from either. That's right. You're literally talking about the one thing that we can't screw up is the farm and it is filled with all these problems right? Yeah. Yeah and it's often something that to you to exactly what you said. People don't know about it. They're not aware of the complexity or what we're up against or the fact that the farm bill is in is actively being worked on right now. Um unfortunately, you know, those aren't the things that were taught in school and um and ought to be um just as important as growing your own food for, you know, a variety of reasons. Uh I think it's important to know how the food system works and I feel very lucky to be now in this position um getting a quite the education on it. Where do you see this organization going in like 5 years into the future? Where Where do you see the What's the vision for it? Yeah. I think there's um three things that are most important for Farm Link. I think the first is of course continuing to do what we do well today, which is move food. Um I think there's ways in which we can move food that are more effective. Um so you talked about impact earlier in the conversation. Our team is getting really interested in not just moving more pounds of food, but knowing what the impact is and how to measure that. Um so that's um often what comes up in an early stage nonprofit is going from acting to measuring and understanding kind of what that looks like. There's a really important second piece to this, which is the fact that we were founded by students. So this youth leadership aspect has always been part of the DNA here at Farm Link and um one of the ways in which we continue to cultivate that is through a fellowship we call FIELD. So we take a cohort of students every single year and teach them about food systems and then point them at a problem that they get to go be on the ground and learn about. So they get partnered with a farm or a food bank um and uh then they it all culminates in a final project. We would like to see that continue to expand because I think part of our responsibility isn't just trying to fix one part of the problem, but actually creating more problem solvers. Um I think that is quite unique to FarmLink and being able to do both of those things really well. Um and I think the third thing is just continued innovation, right? So, I said like it's not going to just be one thing. Like we could be the biggest fastest smartest whatever whatever and like it's not going to solve the root cause of hunger or the root cause of food waste. It takes awesome partnership with many and so I think the third piece will be innovation and continuing to actually create new interventions. This one happens to work really well and it's going to be one of many. So, how else can we take sort of the model in which we were started and scaled and do that in other ways that touch on food waste, food insecurity, climate, and the American farmer. Yeah, it almost it almost feels like you're setting the stage to solve some bigger problems within the industry, which is interesting angle. You might you're seeing this from a logistical point of view, but then you're also seeing solutions that could possibly be fixing things, which is puts you in an interesting spot. Well, I would say as someone who's entrepreneurial by nature, seeing a boatload of problems like this is actually really fun and exciting cuz all you have is problems to solve and many of them are very solvable, you know, like even what we're doing today, you know, it's just a lot of logistics. Yeah. Yeah, there's they they need the Silicon Valley folks need to put some pitch decks together and you know, solve these some of these problems for you, I think. Yeah. Yeah. Well, we hope to have their support. Oh, very good. Very good. So, that's kind of like one of the things you're actively doing is engaging with the students, having them come in and and do that. So, I I totally get where you're going with that. Mhm. Okay. So, Alisha, thank you so much for your time today. This is a great sort of like synopsis and lowdown of the food industry. I I plan to do some nice clipping of these and hopefully bring some awareness to the industry. That's amazing. Yeah, and farmlinkproject.org is where you can go learn more about us and donate. And I hope your listeners do and we're just excited to continue to get the word out. So thank you so much for having me in the conversation. Thanks for coming and for providing this perspective. It was really refreshing. Thank you.