Chris Layne

Entrepreneurship

CRJS/CYSE/SOC 494

Proposal

Today there are hungry people all over the country that could use a helping hand. There are already many, many establishments that provide meals for homeless and those who are less fortunate. On a daily basis, I have run into various business operations who dispose of good food, only because of some corporate policy. Not all food that has passed an expiration date is bad, spoiled or otherwise inedible.

There are Federal laws and oversight in place for food overwatch, and for good reasons. There are times when people have exhibited their dark sides and introduced some type of contamination to a product deliberately to harm others. There are other times that industrial accidents have made food not worthy of consuming. There are sometimes things in the micro-biological world that harm our food supplies. While all of these things can never be totally prevented, our government has done a fine job in assuring the countries’ food sources are protected. Sometimes regulation can be too much. When there is an E. coli outbreak, or something similar, we want that oversight. I am sure that everyday operations and oversight of food sold at stores or prepared at restaurants is handled at every level of those protections. It seems at the end of the day, rather than wasting that still good food, it could be, in good conscious and within safety issues, be delivered to someone who would otherwise go without completely.

I have worked in grocery stores, and have family members who have worked in the fast food and restaurant industries. Seeing the amounts of food wasted makes me cringe, so I had the idea of trying to come up with a way to help out hungry people with that wasted food. It is going to take a lot of initial research about health laws and the like, but with the internet these days research is just about taking the time to do it. The collection of the food will be fairly easy just in itself, but getting the establishments to agree to give the food away is going to be a different monster. Even more than giving the food away the bigger hurdle is to get them to agree to pay me to take it from them!

There will probably be some type of high-level talks and negotiations with corporate white collars to get the ok to get food moving. Finding a way to make it more financially beneficial, coherent and responsible is going to be a task, but I think with the right approach and first hand experience to showcase, it may not be so bad. For most corporations, it is about the bottom line, but I believe that the human spirit is more powerful than money.

Success in this project will be determined by how many people we can feed, how many corporations we can gather and lastly by profit. Maybe getting this off the ground as a non-profit may be a better route, I think that avenue creates more lanes for government funding? I am a dreamer, a visionary; I would like to see hunger, not only on our country, but worldwide, be an issue of the past. As we grow as humans, in technology and in resources, we have the ability to make it happen. If more of us who are not affected by hunger took a few weeks of not eating, and actually feel the problem, maybe the motivation would drive us faster to a give everyone a full belly.