About Joy's Kitchen
Joy's Kitchen is about Community and Cause
A Community that Works Together
Joy’s is a little different from most places you will walk into. Whether you are receiving food or coming to serve for the first time, you will notice that the focus is on how we can all work together as a community in authentic and intentional ways.
Hunger is a fundamental insecurity that doesn’t have to exist. Food waste is an emergency that can’t be ignored. We can solve food insecurity in our local neighborhoods by leveraging an engaged community, block by block, neighbor by neighbor.
Every time you eat food from Joy’s, you ARE THE SOLUTION.
Recovering Food Waste
Every day in Colorado, 42% of all food in our retail chains (food system) becomes waste, primarily due to overproduction.
There is only so much room in a store that can hold all the choices we have come to expect for us at the ready. Fresh produce doesn’t always look perfect products sometimes don’t sell as expected. Consumers who require these choices are driving a consumer market that is disconnected and critical.
What happens to things that don’t get purchased? You guessed it. It is thrown away. Over 80 billion pounds of food a year are discarded in landfills in America. (https://nutritionconnect.org/resource-center/food-waste-america-2020-statistics-and-facts)
“More than a third of all food grown for human consumption in the United States never makes it to someone’s stomach, according to the nonprofit ReFED. That’s about $408 billion worth of food, grown on 18 percent of U.S. farmland with 4 trillion tons of water.
"The carbon footprint of U.S. food waste is greater than that of the airline industry. Globally, wasted food accounts for about 8 percent of all greenhouse gas emissions. The environmental consequences of producing food that no one eats are massive.”
The Washington Post
(full story here:
https://www.washingtonpost.com/climate-solutions/2021/02/25/climate-curious-food-waste/
It is estimated that currently, in Colorado, one in every 5 people does not know where their next meal comes from.
Joy’s Kitchen works on a micro level to combat food waste by cultivating relationships with food producers, growers, and retailers to develop strategic donation programs to save viable food from going to the trash. We recover between 6000-10,000 pounds of food each day, 6 days a week, with two trucks and two trailers. By distributing rescued food quickly, we effectively maintain continuity that prevents food waste, AND we can help reduce the ever-increasing problem of food insecurity.
Rescuing food that would otherwise end up in a landfill, we can save millions of pounds of food from causing further damage to the precious environment and provide nutritious food to our neighbors.
BRIDGING INTENTIONAL COMMUNITY AND FOOD RECOVERY = A HEALTHY AND FED PLANET AND PEOPLE.