30 years of serving neediest with S.F.’s abundant leftovers
At the California Street location of Mollie Stone’s, a pricey grocery store in one of San Francisco’s wealthiest neighborhoods, Mary Risley pushed a shopping cart full of day-old baguettes, rolls and sandwiches tied up in a white garbage bag, walking with a slight hobble from recent hip and knee replacements.
The haul was for her organization, Food Runners, which coordinates and delivers food donations to charitable organizations that feed the poor. Though grateful, she knew there could be more.
“I want all this,” said Risley, pointing at the manicured piles of salad, baked pasta and grilled chicken in the deli case, a spread she’s pretty sure must result in leftovers at the end of the day.
Even three decades after founding Food Runners, Risley is constantly driven to get a bigger portion of the food that San Francisco routinely wastes into the mouths of the hungry.
After starting off in her living room, Food Runners now recovers an estimated 17 tons of perishable and prepared food a week — enough to make 3,000 meals a day — straight from catered parties and hotel buffets to homeless encampments and after-school programs.
But considering that 23 percent of San Franciscans are at risk of hunger, that’s still not enough for her.
“What I would like is every business in San Francisco — the law firm at Montgomery Street, the bake shop at Dogpatch, the caterer in Pacific Heights — I want everybody to know they don’t have to throw good food away. It doesn’t matter how long it’s been out,” said Risley, 75, whose green eyes, which study you in conversation, and mischievous smile work their charms on the people she hits up for donations.
Food Runners’ growth in the past three decades serves as a gauge of San Francisco’s vast wealth disparity. The organization’s budget, which for many years was less than $1,000, has risen to $400,000 in the past two years, largely because South of Market corporate cafeteria donations have created a need for more professional help. And while many new app-based food recovery efforts have emerged trying to use a similar model, Food Runners still gets the job done in an old-fashioned, analog way.
“As with so many food technology things, you see all these people coming in and saying, ‘Oh, we can solve this problem. It’s just a logistics issue,’ ” said food systems consultant Wendy Weiden, who said legacy groups like Food Runners remain best at dealing with the more difficult non-logistics issues, such as establishing relationships with donors and recipients.
The organization is still mostly run by 200 volunteers who pull regular delivery shifts — and whom Risley keeps happy with parties thrown twice a year. The organization now has a driver, two cargo bike couriers and a dispatcher on staff, and it owns its own truck.
Donors like LinkedIn, the Ritz-Carlton and Kara’s Cupcakes use an app to communicate what they have to give, and then Food Runners’ dispatcher, Nancy Hahn, matches the food with an organization that can use it, fitting the number of servings with the number of clients. She also makes sure the recipient has the facilities to handle the particular type of food — whether it’s perishable groceries, bagged lunches or trays of prepared meals. Then she sends off a runner.
“Every soup kitchen I work with daily — they couldn’t operate without Food Runners. They would be down to (serving food) one to two days a week,” said Danny Higginbotham, chef at Walden House, which serves an estimated 1.8 million meals a year to clients with mental health and substance abuse issues. That number would be 1.2 million without Food Runners’ donations, he said.
Part of the nonprofit’s success comes from Risley’s tenacity, present at the start, when she wanted to donate extra food from her now closed cooking school Tante Marie and couldn’t find a way.
“I used my skill at delegating to force people into picking up food and taking it to shelters,” said Risley, known to have “strongly encouraged” her onetime culinary students to volunteer, too.
“She’s a biker with a chef jacket,” said Higginbotham. “She’s a tough woman.”
After delivering the Mollie Stone’s donation to a neighborhood center serving lowincome seniors, Risley got back in her car and headed to Real Foods, a grocer on Polk Street. This donation was much larger and more perishable, including large tubs of yogurt, cartons of eggs and boxes full of milk, all just past their sell-by date. Sellby dates are set by manufacturers and are not required by law, but most stores and the Food Bank avoid selling or giving away food past its sell-by date, even if the sell-by date is not necessarily a reflection of the food's quality.
“This is so great,” said Risley. “I was expecting some rotten bananas.” She hugged store supervisor Enrico Granados and headed off again.
In an alley off Columbus Avenue, Risley pulled up to the side door of North Beach Citizens, a neighborhood center that helps get homeless into transitional housing and drug treatment programs. A rush of people came to unload her car, including clients who live off their Social Security benefits.
“The money runs out. You tend to spend more in the beginning of the month,” said Jeff, 55, who is in cancer treatment. (He didn’t give his last name.) Looking at the cartons of milk, he said, “It does more than nourish me. It’s good for my soul.”
It can be hard to get new donors on board, said Risley. Some are afraid of liability, though California law protects food businesses that donate food to charity from liability as long as no negligence is involved.
“The hard one to convince are the hotels,” Risley said. They can donate food from the buffet line, just not plated leftovers that were brought to a table. “It’s a question of managing the culture. Maybe a manager wants to donate, but who’s at the party clearing the buffet at 9:30?”
That is one of the reasons Weiden, the consultant, said that programs like Food Runners are not always scalable. Weiden also thinks that not enough attention is paid to food safety in many such programs, though in Food Runners’ case, door-to-door delivery is within an hour, Risley said.
The self-described rich lady, who lives in a large home on the edge of Pacific Heights that she bought while running her cooking school, said she has never taken a salary from her nonprofit. She started the school, which closed in 2014, with no financial backing from her family and no college education, just a diploma from secretarial school. But after helping to get food to the addicted, the poor and the hungry for decades, she often says that she could have ended up like one of them, sleeping in a car or on the sidewalk.
Her goal is to make sure the organization is self-sufficient before she steps away, preferably before she turns 80.
“I can’t be bossing people around for the rest of my life,” she said.