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Every Friday morning, in the delivery docks of grocery stores and parking spots outside of bakeries from Aspen to Carbondale, Gray Warr shows up for the leftovers: Vegetables, turkeys, sandwich bread and fruit juice, plus birthday cakes, baguettes, cookies and eggnog, hauled to his van by the cartful.
His mission, as the founder of the nonprofit Harvest for Hunger, is to “rescue” unsold food and redistribute it through food banks and mobile pantries. Since 2021, with help from one part-time employee and a small crew of volunteers, Warr has collected more than 250,000 pounds of food. A single haul can total upward of 1,500 pounds on a Friday, and 200 to 500 pounds on a different route on Tuesdays.
“I was surprised. I was floored. I had no idea there was so much waste,” Warr said while waiting for donations on a recent Friday morning at City Market in Aspen. “That's a lot of food in the landfill, that's no longer there. It’s quite amazing, actually.”
Statistics from the hunger relief organization Feeding America show the scope of food waste nationwide: Almost 40% of all food in the United States goes unsold or uneaten — while 44 million people face food insecurity, struggling to afford groceries.
Food rescue tackles both issues at once, keeping items out of the trash while helping to feed people in need. And it goes far beyond the basics of canned beans and dry pasta. Warr partners with food bank organizations like LIFT-UP and the Food Bank of the Rockies, which augment their supply of nonperishable foods with “rescued” groceries and other items purchased from suppliers.
“Food banks are designed to help people survive,” Warr said. “And food rescue, I feel, is designed to help people thrive.”
Here in the Roaring Fork Valley — where the resort economy comes with a higher price for everything, the local food pantries serve thousands of people annually, and the need continues to grow each year — there are lots of folks who need help both surviving and thriving.
“When you take account of the cost of living, many, many people here live below what's called the ‘federal poverty index,’” said Katherine Sand, who directs the local resource center Aspen Family Connections. “So in that situation, you know, food insecurity is an absolute reality.”
During the COVID-19 pandemic, Sand helped run a mobile food pantry, where Gray Warr was one of the volunteers. Warr helped out at the food pantry in his free time, when he wasn’t working as a snowboard instructor. And he had an idea to augment existing supplies of food by rounding up the groceries tourists leave behind after their vacations.
“I think what Gray understands is that it's not all just about, sort of, food and nutrition, and ‘here's a can of beans,’” Sand said. “You know, people also need to have pleasure from food.”
Sand thought the Warr’s initial premise was a good idea, but that he needed to think bigger by rescuing unused food from grocery stores instead of ski condos.
Warr took her up on the idea, and went from collecting 30 or 40 pounds of food from multiple stops to collecting hundreds of pounds of groceries at a single store. He learned how to establish a nonprofit from YouTube, he said; his past experience working in emergency response and management likely helped when it came to logistics, too.
The challenge isn’t getting food from the grocery stores, Warr said, but getting it to the people who could use it, because going to a food bank can come with a stigma.
“I think that there's more food than we could ever get rid of, and I worry that we're not reaching as many people as we could be reaching,” Warr said. “I want to start focusing on not only helping the people that are desperate, but also helping the people that are living paycheck to paycheck.”
To do that, Warr is opening a food pantry in Snowmass Village, where he lives and works. The concept was officially approved by the Snowmass Town Council on Monday night, and is likely to open by the end of the year in Town Hall. The pantry will be open five days a week, and people will be able to just drop in and grab what they’d like, no questions asked.
“They're trying to make things less bureaucratic, you know, that you don't have to account for yourself or talk about your income, or say how many people are in your family,” Sand said. “If you need food, we have a lot of food. … I think we owe it to everybody in this community to share as much as possible.”
Warr agrees. He wants the food pantry to be “stigma free,” a way to help “anyone who needs a leg up.”
“I feel that everyone should have (the) opportunity (to eat well) — food should be a right,” he said.
