from “le détroit” · the strait
Make Food Not Waste kept more than 100,000 pounds of food out of Detroit landfills in 2025 and turned it into 120,000 meals for neighbors facing food insecurity.
A Detroit nonprofit spent 2025 catching food on its way to the landfill and turning it into dinner.
Make Food Not Waste kept more than 100,000 pounds of food out of landfills last year and converted it into 120,000 nutritious meals for Detroiters facing food insecurity.
The organization started in 2017 at Jefferson Avenue Presbyterian Church, and its idea has stayed simple. Surplus produce from farms, grocery stores, food distributors, and local restaurants gets routed to a professional kitchen instead of a dumpster.
That kitchen sits inside the Salvation Army Harbor Light center at 8625 E. Jefferson Ave. Each week, the chefs collaborate to design menus around whatever good food arrives.
The approach is what the group calls "hospitality, not charity." Meals go out with no proof of need required, and the kitchen distributes roughly 2,000 of them every week.
Since the Upcycling Kitchen opened in January 2021, that steady rhythm has added up. The program reports keeping close to 500,000 pounds of food out of landfills and producing about 450,000 meals.
Beyond the kitchen, the group has grown into a policy force. Make Food Not Waste launched The 2030 Project, an effort to divert all food waste from the 15 largest cities in Southeast Michigan by the end of 2030. Southfield went first, with planning funded by the Michigan Department of Environment, Great Lakes and Energy.
The scale is enormous. Michigan landfills more than 2 billion pounds of food a year.
Make Food Not Waste also created the MI 2030 Food Waste Coalition.
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