College students from Tulane University and Louisiana State University plan to save literal truckloads of food this Super Bowl Sunday in New Orleans via their work with nonprofit the Food Recovery Network (FRN).
This will be the fifth year running for FRN’s Big Game initiative, where students rescue surplus food from The Player’s Tailgate, a major Super Bowl event put on each year by Bullseye Entertainment Group. Hellmann’s Mayonnaise is also involved in the event for the second year running.
For 2025, Guy Fieri’s Flavortown Tailgate will also participate in FRN’s initiative.
Rather than heading to the landfill, rescued food will be donated to those experiencing hunger via the New Orleans Mission.
Diehards of American football consider the Super Bowl a national holiday in its own right. But like other festive times of year, massive amounts of food waste are the byproducts of such celebrations. Each year, more than 140,000 pounds of surplus Super Bowl food goes to the landfill, according to FRN — an amount of food about 40 times heavier than a Ford Taurus.
“Our large scale events allow us to recover truckloads of food at a time,” FRN executive director Regina Harmon tells AgFunderNews.
The Player’s Tailgate is well known as a top “foodie” destination for the Super Bowl. This year’s event is hosted by celebrity chefs Marcus Samuelsson, Marc Murphy and Aaron May, and a quick glance at the menu reveals the breadth of food that will be available to partygoers, and how much could potentially go to waste.
FRN points out that this year’s party also comes on the heels of a rare winter storm that struck NOLA a couple weeks ago and underscores the impacts of climate change.
“The people of New Orleans are no strangers to the impact of climate disasters on their community, and limiting food waste is one of many ways we can all work together to reduce carbon emissions and create a more climate-resilient world,” says Harmon. “And in a city where 62,000 New Orleanians are facing food insecurity, our recovery efforts can help to tackle two crises at once.”
At the 2024 Super Bowl in Las Vegas, Nevada, students with FRN recovered and donated around 3,994 pounds of food, or the equivalent of 3,328 meals.
Community colleges: 50,000 lbs of food saved and counting
College students continue to form the backbone of FRN, which was founded in 2011 and works with more than 8,000 students across more than 200 US schools to recover and redistribute food to people in need.
A special focus for 2025 will be the organization’s expansion into community colleges, says Harmon.
Research done by FRN shows that more two-year community colleges, rather than four-year universities, exist in communities struggling with food access.
Community College Recovery Grants from FRN offer technical and financial assistance to these schools to design and implement food recovery programs.
“We have the capacity and the finances to support community colleges in selecting one of the models that RFN has to recover food,” says Harmon.
Thus far, grants have gone to Central Lakes College (Brainerd, MN), Green River College (Auburn, WA), Montgomery County Community College (Blue Bell, PA), San Diego College of Continuing Education (San Diego, CA) and State Board for Community Colleges and Occupational Education and Community College of Aurora (Aurora, CO).
Harmon says that among this first cohort of schools, one has already recovered 50,000 pounds of food.
Beyond campus
FRN’s efforts stretch far beyond campus borders at this point, too.
Its FRN 10x framework aims to grow the organization’s reach from 4,000 to 40,000 people by 2030.
“We [examined] all this disaggregated data: US census, SNAP benefits, the poverty data, the MIT living wage center. Where could we be the most effective? We mapped out one county for every single state, and from there we were able to expand our offerings of solutions so that we now do free fresh produce pop up markets. We started in Atlanta, soon after the maps were put out.”
She says FRN is currently in the process of expanding that, and now also has a presence in Baltimore, Maryland and St. Paul, Minnesota. More cities are on the near horizon.
“We work really closely with the communities there, because for us it is about dignity and respect and listening to the community,” she adds. “We’re not here to tell them, ‘Oh, this is what you need. You need a new FRN chapter.’ We work really closely with the communities, let them know what our offerings are, and from there, they tell us what their needs are.”
