Feed Louisville restructures, moves to new location

The organization's housing program and kitchen have been divided into two separate entities after three years of operating together.

LOUISVILLE — Having been operating for three years, Feed Louisville is restructuring and returning to its roots of reducing food waste and feeding the community at a new facility.

Rhona Kamar and Donny Greene founded Feed Louisville in 2020, which became a certified 501c3 organization two years later. What started during the pandemic as a mission to cook meals for the city's homeless population expanded to an organization that also looked to help remove barriers to permanent housing.

Now, these two missions of feeding the homeless population and removing housing barriers are operated by two separate entities. Kamar will continue to head Feed Louisville as a non-profit distributing meals to people in need, while Greene will continue to operate outreach and the Arthur Street Hotel as a separate organization.

"We realized that we were bigger, different organizations than we had been when we first started," Greene said.

Feed Louisville has been operating out of the Douglass Boulevard Christian Church kitchen since the organization’s inception. In November, the growing operation will move to a larger space in Butchertown.

Going forward, Feed Louisville is planning to focus on being the intermediary between food waste and hunger relief while developing new programs to aid in other food-related crises.

The U.S. Department of Agriculture estimates that 30-40% of the country’s food supply is wasted, as a result of issues in production and transportation, equipment malfunctioning, over-ordering, and disposing of blemished produce on the retail level, and consumers buying or cooking more than needed.

Kamar, who previously worked as a caterer and a partner of Ramsi’s Cafe on the World, said that overproduction is a part of the catering industry’s culture.

“You have no idea, normally, how many customers you're gonna have in a day so you overproduce. The worst fear of a caterer is running out of food,” she said.

Feed Louisville Executive Director Rhona Kamar, Office Manager Lisa Crain and Chef Madeline Karcher work together at the organization's first location in Douglass Boulevard Christian Church.

But no chef wants to see their food go to a landfill, Kamar continued, wishing that an organization like Feed Louisville existed when she was catering. At the end of a catering event, Kamar said she was basically micromanaging leftovers by trying to figure out where the 2-10 pounds of food was going to go.

“Let's take in this food that would go into the landfill and make something really beautiful with it, and that’s what our chefs do every day,” Kamar said.

In 2022, Feed Louisville rescued 160,000 pounds of food from ending up in landfills. The total amount of rescued food amounted to $275,000, with each pound valued at around $1.70.

Feed Louisville now spends five days a week “micromanaging leftovers” from across the city to feed the rising homeless population.

“Our work is humanitarian crisis relief. Homelessness is a humanitarian crisis, every day. We just stopped looking at it that way because we numb out to it; we walk by it every day,” Kamar said.

The number of people experiencing homelessness in Louisville is reported to have increased by 41% from 2018 to 2021, according to the Coalition for the Homeless’s 2022 Analysis of Homelessness in Louisville.

In the kitchen, chefs and volunteers work to put out a large batch of warm meals each day along with other sandwiches, snacks and beverages donated by community partners.

Volunteers Justin Weiger and Nancy Matyunas build wraps to be donated to Uniting Partners (UP) for Women and Children.

Donations can look like pans of food from restaurants, produce, infinite loaves of bread, individually packaged pastries, bags of chips, electrolyte water additives, baby formula and frozen meals, to name a few.

Wholesale products from Target and Whole Foods also take up a fair amount of space in the Feed Louisville pantry. The donations are provided to the organization through St. Matthews Area Ministries.

Feed Louisville also has grant funding that allows it to partner with some local farms to purchase produce.

Like other food-safe kitchens, Feed Louisville follows a number of other health protocols to ensure that reheated and donated food stays safe for consumption.

All of the ready-to-eat food donated to Feed Louisville comes from kitchens that already follow standard safety procedures when preparing the food originally. In terms of produce, the organization takes all donations, as the food will be cooked before it is distributed.

“There is no shortage of food in this city. There never has been, there never will be,” said Madeline Karcher, a chef for Feed Louisville.

Instead of acquiring food being the challenge, Karcher said it is more difficult to get connected with the people who need it.

Feed Louisville’s model allows for each chef to use their creativity, which is not the standard for chefs at typical restaurant jobs.

“Our chefs come in every day and they assess what we have, and they started sketching out the menu for the day, which is a really unique model,” Kamar said.

While the kitchens are not lacking in food, the challenge for the chefs is creating hardy, delicious meals out of a random collection of ingredients.

When it’s Karcher's turn to don a chef’s apron, the first task is mentally cataloging the produce and meat options available and deciding what flavor profile those ingredients best lend themselves to.

“Since it is unlikely that we're ever gonna have enough servings of any one thing, it's difficult to build one individual meal. So, it's more of just like we're gonna cook these [vegetables] in this particular manner with this flavor profile, and we're gonna make all the meat to match it,” Karcher said.

The last item on Karcher’s agenda is deciding what starch pairs best with the meat and vegetables.

While there are no limitations in that chefs have to follow a menu, there are a few parameters for each meal. The nutritionally-dense hot meals that go out daily must include eight ounces of starch, six ounces of vegetables and four ounces of meat.

“This meal may be the only meal this person gets today or even in two days. So we're trying to make something that's really going to fill them up,” Kamar said.

Feed Louisville’s meal portion standard is larger than other organizations, which might mean that the number of meals they disperse is lower than that of other groups, according to Karcher.

In 2022, Feed Louisville distributed 100,000 meals to houseless and food-insecure individuals, averaging nearly 274 meals a day. As of this July, the group has already matched last year's meal count.

Once the meals are cooked, the Feed Louisville team, which often includes volunteers, prep the meals to be distributed. The portions are sectioned out into plastic containers before being placed back in the warmer and later into a thermal bag for delivery.

In addition to distributing hot meals each day, Feed Louisville creates daily packages for houseless individuals staying in hotels around Louisville. These packages consist of an entree to be reheated in a hotel microwave as well as a sandwich or wrap.

Feed Louisville provides about 1,000 sandwiches and/or wraps weekly to food-insecure and houseless populations across Louisville.

With some of the donated pre-packaged food, Feed Louisville creates house boxes at the request of the organization’s outreach partners. The boxes can include frozen meals, snack food, bottled drinks, fruits, cheese, etc.

In addition to serving the Louisville community, Feed Louisville also aids other communities during natural disasters. In the past, the organization helped cook for those affected by the Western Kentucky tornado in 2021 and the Eastern Kentucky floods in 2022, without stopping production in the Louisville kitchen.

Although the organization would be ready to go if a disaster occurred tomorrow, it is developing a Disaster Relief Program that would establish a systematic response, create partnerships with other groups in the region and connect the team with global food disaster relief initiatives.

Moving forward, Kamar is also interested in increasing access to more nutritional food with a Food as Medicine program. Kamar is looking to foster medical partnerships to bring nutritional food to communities with health concerns while they're still in the process of developing the program.

Those who are interested in volunteering with Feed Louisville can reach out at the organization’s website. Volunteers typically work with Feed Louisville’s volunteer coordinator, Sean Koojan, to help build and package meals.

Feed Louisville also welcomes financial donations online, through Venmo (@Feed-Louisville) and by check. The organization also has an Amazon wishlist including items like chafing fuel and cooking equipment. The list can be found at FeedLouisville.org/donate.

Those looking to learn cooking skills of their own can purchase Feed Louisville’s first cookbook. The cookbook is called "Every Cook, Every Kitchen" and can be found at Feed Louisville's Linktree: linktr.ee/feedlouisville.

Click here to read more about the cookbook and the idea behind it.