002: Making Food Rescue a Universal Standard, Not An Exception with Robert Lee

Essential Ingredients Podcast

"Our mission is to redistribute excess food to people experiencing food insecurity— and make food rescue the universal standard rather than the exception." —Robert Lee

Food insecurity and hunger is a tragic reality. Despite the overwhelming abundance of food, millions of people around the world are still hungry and do not have regular access to enough nutritious food to support a healthy lifestyle. Hunger does not only affect individuals, but also has socio-economic impacts on communities and countries, affecting economic development, education, health, and even security. To address this global problem, we must prioritize creating equitable access to quality food.

Robert Lee experienced first-hand what it was like to live with food insecurity as an underserved child. This prompted him to create Rescuing Leftover Cuisine (RLC) in 2013, a nonprofit organization that seeks to prevent the waste of food and end hunger. In the following years, RLC's work has helped in drastically reducing how much food is wasted each year and improving food security for thousands of people.

Listen in as Justine and Robert talk about the mission of RLC, how food rescue can solve world hunger, our role in making food rescue a universal standard, the importance of getting educated in entrepreneurship, the importance of processes and boundaries in business building, the best way to start in business, and the next steps for RLC.

Meet Robert:

As someone who experienced food insecurity as a child, Robert Lee was very familiar with the wasted food and hunger issues facing our society. That is what led him to launch Rescuing Leftover Cuisine (RLC), a nonprofit organization that targets both the prevention of wasted food and putting an end to hunger, in New York City in the summer of 2013. He left his full time job at J.P. Morgan in 2014 to run RLC full-time, using seed money he and co-founder Louisa Chen won at a venture competition during their senior year at NYU, as well as corporate donations from his former employer. In the eight years since, RLC has expanded to 8 regions and rescued over 7 million pounds of excess food.

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Episode Highlights:

01:14 Food Rescue— Making It a Universal Standard

05:27 How Much Excess Food is Thrown Away?

08:25 How to Grow Your Company

11:04 The Importance of Learning

14:06 What's Next with RLC?

17:40 What We Can Do to Help