Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: MONDAY, November 15, 1993 TAG: 9311150051
SECTION: VIRGINIA PAGE: C-1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: MIKE HUDSON STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: LENGTH: Long
In the daily rush-rush of restaurant business, there are bound to be some leftovers - just as there are at your own home. The difference is that restaurants can't pop the leftovers in the microwave and serve them the next day, or the next week.
Until recently, that meant there was only one thing to do with such food: throw it away.
But not anymore. A new program, Virginia's Table, is working to keep food from going to waste. The idea is to divert the food, store it safely and then deliver it to cash-strapped social service agencies.
For the past six weeks, workers from three Roanoke Valley community agencies - the West End Center for Youth; Lincoln Terrace Head Start; and Hegira House, a drug treatment program - have taken turns picking up pizza, bread sticks and pasta from Pizza Huts.
They usually come away with 25 to 75 pounds of food each day. The pizzas are typically ones that were made for the lunch buffet but not needed, or take-out orders that were never picked up.
"When you make so many pizzas a day, you're going to have some uncontrollable waste," said Chris Greene, area manager for Pizza Hut. "In the past, it was always thrown away. Now we have a good place to take it."
So far, four Pizza Huts - on Brambleton, Brandon and Orange avenues and on West Main Street in Salem - are taking part. But Greene said he hopes to expand the program to all 12 outlets he manages in the Roanoke and New River valleys.
The program is sponsored by Southwest Virginia Second Harvest Food Bank in Roanoke. The food bank long has specialized in getting canned, boxed and packaged food to people who have little money to stock their pantries and refrigerators. Now it is branching out to coordinate the pickup of restaurant foods. It will be similar to programs under way in Richmond, Norfolk and Newport News.
The food bank, which serves much of Southwest Virginia, hopes eventually to expand the "prepared foods" program to Danville, Martinsville, the New River Valley and points west.
The project is headed up by Erica Cook, a VISTA volunteer at the food bank, and Eric Eanes, a volunteer who works as a sales representative for PYA-Monarch, a Roanoke restaurant-food supplier.
Eanes, who covers six states on his job, was in Hilton Head, S.C., earlier this year when he saw a truck pull into a Holiday Inn. He thought it was a competitor's, and decided to investigate.
Eanes learned that the truck driver was not a competitor: He was picking up leftover hot food from the motel's restaurant and taking it to a homeless shelter.
"The thought of that just hit me as being a great idea - and something we could do here," Eanes said.
He had always thought it was a shame that restaurants were forced to throw away so much food each day. "Over the years, I thought about what a waste it was," he said.
A couple of months after his chance discovery in South Carolina, his wife, Vonda, was at a community meeting and ran into Pam Irvine, the food bank's director. Irvine told Vonda Eanes that she had been trying for months to get a prepared food program going, without much tangible success.
Vonda Eanes told Irvine that her husband had been wondering how to start just such a program. Eric Eanes joined in, and the program has taken off.
Irvine and Cook say Eric Eanes has been a perfect chairman for the volunteer task force: He has lots of contacts in the restaurant business, and he's a super salesman who does a great job of "selling" the idea to potential contributors.
Businesses are helping Virginia's Table get started.
Country Cookin' has promised to donate its own food-storage units and soon will start setting aside leftovers for pickup. Stop-In convenience stores will allow Virginia's Table to put donation cans in all its locations. Crestar Bank is helping with fund raising.
Cook and Eanes hope to raise $75,000 in the next year and hire a full-time coordinator who can expand the program.
"It's going to require a lot of capital just to keep it going," Eanes said.
Agencies that receive the food now have to come pick it up. Eventually, food bank officials hope they will be able to have a volunteer pick up food from several restaurants and distribute it to various agencies.
Cook said 72 social service agencies have said they would like to take part in the program. "The more donors we get, the more agencies we'll get into the program," Cook said. "It all depends on the number of donors."
On a recent Thursday afternoon, Irvine, Cook and Greene, the Pizza Hut area manager, were chatting about the program when he mentioned that he had a couple of items the food bank or its client agencies might want: a large pizza cooler and a pizza oven.
"It's surprising how generous people will be, if you just ask them," Irvine said. "There are so many caring people, I think. It's just that you have to find them."
For more information, call Erica Cook at the food bank at 342-3011.
by CNB