32: College Students Fighting Food Insecurity by Repurposing Surplus Produce

Tracy Stuckrath [00:00:06]:
Welcome to the Eating at a Meeting podcast. I'm your host, Tracy Stuckraft, Dietary needs expert, Certified Meetings Manager, Certified Food Protection Manager. I have searched the globe to find people and businesses who are creating safe, sustainable, and inclusive food and beverage experiences for their employees, guests, and communities. In each episode, you will find authentic conversations about how food and beverage impacts inclusion, sustainability, culture, community health, and wellness. I know that sounds like a lot, but we're going to cover it all. Are you ready to feed, engagement, nourish inclusion, and bolster your bottom line? If so, let's go.

Tracy Stuckrath [00:00:50]:
In today's episode, you'll hear a conversation that I had back in June with Aiden Riley, co founder of the FarmLink project. He and his buddy James Canoff were home from college because their campuses had been shut down as a result of the COVID 19 pandemic. They'd seen on the news that billions of pounds of produce were going to waste during the pandemic, while millions of Americans were going hungry because they'd been furloughed or laid off. Within days, these two college students had called their friends, called some farmers, and called some food banks and created a nonprofit organization called the FarmLink project, which connects farmers to food banks and is committed to alleviating the ramifications of the COVID 19 pandemic.

Tracy Stuckrath [00:01:33]:
To date.

Tracy Stuckrath [00:01:34]:
As of December 15th, the airing of this episode, the FarmLink project has delivered more than 17 billion pounds of produce via truck, car, or plane across the US as we approach the end of the year, there are still millions of people who are struggling to put food on the table because they've been laid off or furloughed. The pandemic has hit us hard. I hope my conversation with Aiden inspires you to go out and help support your local food bank or support one of your friends or family and or gives you the opportunity to find somewhere that you can find food yourself. I appreciate you listening to the Eating at a Meeting podcast. We're all about supporting those who are doing great things in food and beverage to help each other and to feed each other. Thanks for listening.

Aiden Riley [00:02:25]:
I'm great. We're working hard.

Tracy Stuckrath [00:02:27]:
From everything that I see on your social media and the news, I mean, my God, you're in the New York Times, you're on abc, you're on NBC.

Aiden Riley [00:02:37]:
I know we've been actually really, really fortunate that news channels have wanted to pick up what we've been doing because it just, it, you know, I guess we forgot how many people watch the news and we just have, you know, yesterday was abc. And they did a very generous piece on us. And we just had thousands of people reach out and say, hey, we love what you guys are doing, or we want to help, or I would like to volunteer or here's my donation. And it's just like, that's what we run on, basically. That's our. You know, that's our fuel is people. People like that all over the U.S. right? It's been awesome.

Tracy Stuckrath [00:03:12]:
That's fantastic. I guess the first question I want to ask you is you and I saw the same broadcast that they were dumping. Pouring milk out onto the ground and retailing food back into the. Into the ground because they had nowhere to send it. And I called my friend Heather in Atlanta, and I'm like, okay, we've got to do something with this. Because I'm a meet. We're meeting planners. We have convention centers, we have hotels with these huge kitchens in it and thousands of staff that could make food from that food.

Tracy Stuckrath [00:03:48]:
So why can't we connect? I mean, when you saw those stories. So you called James and said, we need to do something about.

Aiden Riley [00:03:55]:
Yeah, I think we got. We had gotten home from school and, you know, obviously very disruptive. I mean, coming home, right. It was. Right. Getting in the swing of the semester. It was just about to have midterms. Then suddenly I'm back home and sitting in my room all day at the same time, just kind of web surfing a lot, probably an unhealthy amount, just spending too much time on devices.

Aiden Riley [00:04:17]:
And I kept reading these articles about the ones that you mentioned. The New York Times article about the farmer Shea Myers in Idaho burying onions and other farmers in Idaho bearing potatoes and millions and millions of pounds. We also had a personal connection to a food bank in Los Angeles that we worked at when we were younger and I had worked in high school. And we knew that they were burning through months of food supply as the country. As layoffs were occurring all around the country, new people were coming to food banks. And food banks were used to serving 300 people a week. We're serving 1500 people a week. It was looking grim.

Aiden Riley [00:04:56]:
And we thought, okay, this is a gigantic problem, but let's try to connect one of these farms from the New York Times article, for example, with this food bank. And we did that. We did. That was our first shipment was what we did is we cold called the farmer and we said, hey, we heard you have a bunch of onions. What is the minimum amount of cost we can pay you so that these farm. So that it's economically Viable for you to not bury these onions and instead ship them down to Los Angeles to this food bank. And that came out to around $1,000 for 50,000 pounds of onions. So we raised that.

Aiden Riley [00:05:31]:
Yeah, yeah. Which we were like, okay, we need to do this. And we raised the money through friends and family. We got $1,000. We paid it, we arranged it to happen. We said, okay, this is an extremely dire situation. I mean these farmers are literally burying their food and they're willing to pay. Many of them are willing to pay just above just the amount that they can use to keep their.

Aiden Riley [00:05:57]:
To give their employees a paycheck. And so that it's. Some farmers bury it because it's more economically viable than it is to give them away. We're like, we'll want to pay just above that and then you can get a tax write off. We'll give it to a food bank. And so it became a repeatable process. And the rest is kind of history. I mean we had within the.

Aiden Riley [00:06:15]:
We've been exponential. I mean we've brought on. There was two of us at first and then four of us, and then 10 of us, and then 20 of us. Now there's 170 of us working on that same sort of process, basically calling food banks, calling farmers all over the United States. Now we very much have a research sector that informs our decisions and where we give food and where we get food so that we can have the highest impact. We have just a ton of smart. Not just students anymore, but just people who. Something happened with their job, as has happened to millions of people around the country.

Aiden Riley [00:06:51]:
They were furloughed or they were in between jobs at the time and now they were stuck and they said, I want to come help you. I've taken 10 years of experience in agriculture, for example, taking those people in to learn more and learn now how we can be most effective platform we have. So that's translated into like an exponential amount of food moved each week. Now it's. Now we're at about a million pounds a week and we could do more. Yeah.

Tracy Stuckrath [00:07:15]:
And so how much have you donated so far?

Aiden Riley [00:07:18]:
How much we've donated? Sometimes it changes every day. I gotta find it on the website. But it's about $300,000. And that's something important to us is that 100%. I'm looking on our website right now. We have. We took it off anyways. It's about $300,000.

Aiden Riley [00:07:34]:
And that's been all through donations from people around the country. Nobody at our organization has Taken a cent. And that money has been 100% spent on finding on food to food banks.

Tracy Stuckrath [00:07:45]:
That's fantastic. And now and I was looking on your website so you have a great map and you guys put it. I think your website is much broader in scope than it was a couple of weeks ago when I first looked at it. So I'm some web guys to help you. Which is awesome.

Aiden Riley [00:08:02]:
Yeah, we've brought. We have. I can take absolutely zero credit for that website. I did not code one line of it. But we've lucky enough to have guys come on who are computer science majors who coded websites before and they're just, you know, they work every day. We call them our DevOps team and they make it, they, they work every day to make the website sort of coherent and easy to look at and easy to understand. There's a lot of stuff on there right now and we're working to make it every day. You know, translate the message simply.

Aiden Riley [00:08:33]:
People can connect with it.

Tracy Stuckrath [00:08:35]:
I think it's pretty clean and clear and it shows your impact. And so there's that map on there. And the only thing I don't see is like the key to what the different colors are. So like California's bright orange. Then where I am in North Carolina, it's like a fainted, you know, orange. Does that mean where you've had. I mean and when you click on the state you find out how much has been donated. So £87,800 here in North Carolina.

Tracy Stuckrath [00:09:04]:
So that makes me want to get involved here in North Carolina. What can I do? I shop at the farmers market every single week.

Aiden Riley [00:09:10]:
Yeah.

Tracy Stuckrath [00:09:11]:
You know, where can they do. And I've got farmers ton of farmer friends in Alabama and Georgia where I used to live. So connecting you with them too. But how, you know, all of these people in all of those states are they, they're just people that saw you on the news and wanted to help and now you've. Because how are you connecting farmers to farm banks or to food banks?

Aiden Riley [00:09:33]:
So yeah, that key that does show kind of, you know, where we've been most successful in moving food and where we. And then places that we haven't yet gotten food yet. I think that's largely reflective of the growing seasons. And you know, we're calling indiscriminately. We didn't start by saying we're only going to help California or we're only going to help New York or Washington, et cetera. I think maybe there was a natural bit of, you know, most of us are from California who are working on the. I can't. Many of us who started the project are from California.

Aiden Riley [00:10:05]:
So I think that's where we naturally expanded outwards from. And there are just, you know, the original reports we read were largely Oregon, Idaho, Washington. That's where the farmers were who had that. They hit them right in the middle of their like picking season and they're the ones with the most surplus. That being said, the seasons change and we are able to, if you like, if we get an email from Arkansas, Florida, Michigan, you know, anywhere in the country that says we need this food, we can get it to you. We now are large enough and we have 40 people working full time on the farms team organized, we call them in sprints. If we need to find food for a certain area, like we're going to be able to do it.

Tracy Stuckrath [00:10:46]:
And I was talking to one of my farmer friends in Alabama earlier today and she found out because they sell direct to restaurants and that has waned, but their CSA programs have gone skyrocketed. But she found one restaurant was actually buying the food from them and then going and selling it in their own CSA program. But your program is just strictly directly to the food banks, right?

Aiden Riley [00:11:14]:
Yeah, I think there's a lot of initiatives that are popping up. It's something pretty. One of the few silver linings about the terrible situation that the country's in right now is that it's spurring innovation. I mean, you know, disaster spurs innovation and it's. And it's allowing society to look pretty critically at some of the parts that were broken. And I would think it's quite fair to say that the food waste system is broken. Broken in the United States it is. We have.

Aiden Riley [00:11:42]:
We waste for around 40% of the produce grown in the United States goes to waste. And at the same time there are millions and millions of Americans who are going to bed hungry every night. And that obviously does not make any. Not obviously, but it doesn't make any sense. And so we've tried to become be very self aware but the thing is there are organizations who have been doing this for a long time. So we wanted to come in and not reinvent the wheel because we didn't want to come in thinking we're going to save the world without being cognizant of all the players in the space who have been doing this for years and they have their networks and instead we wanted to come in, be self aware about who we are and what we're good at and see how we can help those organizations. So what we found was what we're really good at is finding specifically surplus from farms. That's very unique to the pandemic right now and moving that bulk food and connecting it all over the country so directly to food banks.

Aiden Riley [00:12:35]:
And that's what we've been doing. That's what we've been doing. We have not. There are organizations that work with their organizations that work in like produce boxes, for example, USDA produce boxes, or they take, they glean from restaurants and restaurants give them food waste at the end of the, at the end of the week, basically. And then they take that and they package and they distribute. On an individual level. We in the with how quickly we wanted to just get started and get helping work we've set up, we've decided there are other people who are much better at that than we are. We can give to them bulk as opposed to breaking up and distributing.

Aiden Riley [00:13:09]:
That's kind of the thing we've been going by here is be wary of indigestion, not starvation. And what we mean by that is not that we don't have enough plate, it's not that we'll never not have enough. If farmlink were in order, farmlink to succeed, it's not that we wouldn't have enough food waste to work with or enough food banks who might need. And by the way, I don't like calling it food waste because this isn't waste, it's good healthy food. It's just excess food. Excess to work with or food banks. Our issue would be taking on too much and trying to be too many things at once to where we're spread too thin and therefore we're not really helping anybody to the best of our ability.

Tracy Stuckrath [00:13:46]:
Oh no, that's fantastic. And you know, in the meetings industry, we are, and I talk about that in sustainable events is we do waste 40% of our food in the United States. And my first realization of that was actually at the World Expo in Milan in 2015 and it was all focused on food. And when you walked into that whole event, the first thing you walked into was a gigantic warehouse exhibition on food waste.

Aiden Riley [00:14:19]:
Yeah.

Tracy Stuckrath [00:14:20]:
And it was mind blowing. I'm like, okay, so how can I go back to my world of event planning and you know, teach meeting planners, don't order too much food, you know, understand your numbers because we are throwing food away at the end of the day because they don't, they don't want food to be seen as it's running out. But you've got those people who are now who Were at those events who are now going to the food banks because they've lost their jobs.

Aiden Riley [00:14:47]:
Yeah.

Tracy Stuckrath [00:14:48]:
And so learning how to manage that.

Tracy Stuckrath [00:14:50]:
So I do.

Tracy Stuckrath [00:14:51]:
It's. It's like food rescue before it gets to be food waste. And I. That's just so awesome. The one. How many farmers and food banks are you working with now, do you know? Or is that.

Aiden Riley [00:15:07]:
We're working with. You know, it's going to be an estimate off the top of my head, but we're working with. We're working with, I would say, you know, in 29 states. 20. I mean, I think it's something somewhere around 40 farmers that we've worked with and, you know, some around 100 food banks or so.

Tracy Stuckrath [00:15:28]:
And these are. The farmers are big. The commercial farmers versus the small mom and pop farms. Is that right?

Aiden Riley [00:15:36]:
Yeah, exactly.

Tracy Stuckrath [00:15:36]:
Okay. All right. They've got thousands of pounds of food to send. And Doug, who's in Idaho, is your potato guy, right?

Aiden Riley [00:15:45]:
Yeah.

Tracy Stuckrath [00:15:46]:
That was your first. Just your first delivery for him was 40,000 pounds of potatoes, is that right?

Aiden Riley [00:15:52]:
Yes, Doug was. Doug is a very. Doug is amazing. And he was a perfect example of the types of farmers that we'd like to work with or that we have been working with. And really the reason that we started with half of our mission statement being let's help out the farmers. I mean, he's just a third generation potato farmer in Idaho. Just a big, big 6 foot 6 guy who, you know, usually is outloading, offloading, like 10 trucks a week or more from his 400,000 pounds of potatoes. But then his contacts, his supply chain just got completely destroyed.

Aiden Riley [00:16:28]:
You know, he basically contacted us and he had a mountain of them in his. In his, basically a shed in Idaho. And he was like, basically, can we work together to try to get these out to people who need it?

Tracy Stuckrath [00:16:40]:
So he found you or he saw you on television.

Aiden Riley [00:16:43]:
I think we might have reached out to him. Cold call. And I actually remember getting the message first. It was like, we just found a farmer in Idaho who says he has an infinite amount of potatoes in his backyard. Basically. Then we got to work on trying to end up shipping, I think, £120,000 out.

Tracy Stuckrath [00:17:03]:
Wow. And so in the story on the Today show with Al Roker, you know, he actually asked about the president's signing the bill for $19 billion in funding to help these farmers in this, you know, helping them relieve their. The challenges that they're having. And you said, you know, you want, you know, you want to help the communities that are not getting that $19 billion.

Aiden Riley [00:17:32]:
Yeah.

Tracy Stuckrath [00:17:33]:
And so can you explain a little bit about how you're doing that?

Aiden Riley [00:17:36]:
Yeah, I mean we're doing that with like I mentioned, our research teams who are, you know, data is a kind of our friend here. And we, and the data on food deserts that are popping up are, we got to look at, we have to take a critical look at who's in the networks, who's in the Feeding America network, who before facing food insecurity and had some form of system of some sort of food bank system or redistribution system that the communities could go to. The thing is, with the amount of layoffs around the United States and the just remarkable circumstances, there are new food deserts popping up that we need to take like fresh data on. And basically what we're doing is creating a map so we can map out and pinpoint the most food insecure counties all over the United States. And then, then who are the food banks servicing those counties and then those are the ones we target.

Tracy Stuckrath [00:18:26]:
Okay. All right, so you're, you're, you go to Brown and you're studying political science and government, right? Is that right?

Aiden Riley [00:18:34]:
Exactly.

Tracy Stuckrath [00:18:35]:
You're supposed to graduate in May. So how are you, have you talked to your professors or like, can I, can this business count as my last semester of school?

Aiden Riley [00:18:45]:
I honestly have not. I mean our school has been such a confusing thing for all of us. I mean we, we. I don't even know if I'm going to be going back in the fall. Find out by the end of July basically. But I think I will. And I think, I think, I think the schools have been a great resource for each of us, for all of us. You know that we have students from Stanford and Georgetown and USC and Brown obviously and Harvard and just, just like great institutions all around the US that these, that we've been able to reach out and they can get us in contact either just in there, either in their like newsletter for the week or get us in touch with plenty of professors.

Aiden Riley [00:19:22]:
We work with professors from Cal who can help us with that data and like I was talking about. But yeah, I, in terms of class credit, that is, that's actually a good point. I should think about that.

Tracy Stuckrath [00:19:32]:
So, okay, so then on that same note, I mean, what do you want your thought on what you wanted to do with your degree before you started FarmLink? Has that changed at all? And are you gonna, is Farm Link gonna continue on past you going back to school?

Aiden Riley [00:19:48]:
Yeah, I actually, that's a good question. Before, before all of this, I mean I really was Gonna work in entertainment was my. Was my main. That's where I was. That's where I was headed. And, you know, I. This, I think, has changed a lot of our ideas of what we want to do in the future and where we could, you know, what we can do in the future. So, you know, I'm gonna.

Aiden Riley [00:20:10]:
I think I'm gonna. I'm staying on. Gonna stay on this project full time until we can see it through, till it can stand on its own legs and can continue to be useful for. In fixing this gigantic problem in the United States. But, yeah, that's all I can say. I know for each and every one of us, many of us had nothing to do with food waste or food insecurity or logistics or anything like that before this project. And I think we're each realizing, wow, this is actually a really important space we could work in and are gonna put in as much time as we need to.

Tracy Stuckrath [00:20:40]:
So what's the biggest thing that you've taken away from this?

Aiden Riley [00:20:43]:
The biggest thing I've taken away from this, I think, is that it's not. When you're faced with a problem that is. Seems so. Seems so big, you can't even wrap your head around it, that you can start somewhere. You need to just zero in and focus on where you can help and then build from there as opposed to trying to digest it all at once. Because then you're never going to be able to. You're going to get overwhelmed and you're going to die of indigestion, I guess. You know what I said? What I said is that you can, even if you don't know anything about the space you're going into, as long as you come in with the right humility and the right resourcefulness that you will be able to provide value and potentially help a problem.

Aiden Riley [00:21:23]:
I think that's resonated with all of us here.

Tracy Stuckrath [00:21:26]:
That's awesome. I know. Going step by step and taking those minor steps. Where do you see Food Link and your partnership across the country going as.

Aiden Riley [00:21:36]:
The supply chain sort of repairs itself? And the farmers that we're talking to that had, for example, like Doug has a mound of potatoes in his shed in his backyard a month ago, those farmers are slowly getting back on their feet. I mean, I can't speak as a representative to them because each and every one is different in each and every region. But the country is reopening now restaurants. Yeah. Who knows what it's going to look like in two or three weeks. But the last several weeks, it's been slowly reopening and as restaurants been opening, etc. And supply chains are slowly repairing themselves. We've talked to farmers who, you know, guys like Doug S.

Aiden Riley [00:22:10]:
Who had that surplus and who no longer have it. They're no longer willing to give away £50,000 for $1,000, basically because they either have demand again or they're expecting demand to pick back up. So that being said, now it kind of is responsibility for us because we have this organization we now have, I would call it, a highly structured organization of 170 people who are working full time on this with partnerships, uber freight and with the resources and connections we have. We're like, okay, how can we pivot to make sure that we're continuing to help this gigantic problem of food waste and food insecurity? So what we're doing actively right now is trying to. We're moving into a different. We're going to move into a different space of food waste and acutely target that. There are a lot of organizations we see around the United States specifically that target kind of the downstream food waste. And what I mean by that is the largest sector of food waste aside from home, which is restaurant and supermarkets, etc.

Aiden Riley [00:23:12]:
There are a lot of organizations that do a really great job of working with thousands of restaurants or supermarkets across the US and having drivers take the excess food from there to restaurants. We are going to look to target some of these areas that are not as acutely covered these areas of food waste that are not as acutely covered by organizations. Things like processing plants, things like, you know, packing houses, distribution centers. There, there's good, healthy produce that is basically sent to the landfill every week. Hundreds of thousands of pounds from processing plants, etc. All over the United States. And what we're doing right now is we're learning as much as we can about the food waste system so that we can see which part of which one. Which one of these sectors is most ignored and where can we now put all of our efforts?

Tracy Stuckrath [00:23:59]:
Basically, that's a great plan. And you know, I need to introduce you to my friends at the World Wildlife Federation too, because they're tackling food waste as well, a lot from the hospitality side. So that's, you know, another. From the distribution centers to the hotels and convention centers, that's another thing. But I'll make that introduction to Pete to you. But supply and demand for. For meetings and events, you know, it's probably going to be the last market to come back, you know, because we can't meet except for 10 people. Right.

Tracy Stuckrath [00:24:30]:
You know, restaurants are going to be that. So one of the conversations that I've had with some chefs is that prices are going to go up because the demand is going to be lower. And, you know, some of the, you know, if Doug's replanting already. Right. Is he going to replant the same amount that he projected from last year or from his sales last year? Have you guys gotten into any of that conversation?

Aiden Riley [00:24:54]:
Informally and briefly. But it's these farmers. We know, they're no joke. I mean, they know their industry. And even in a time as unpredictable as this that they didn't plan for, they can look ahead and they can see, all right, we don't know what's gonna happen in the next several months. Our distributors don't know the people we sell to. They don't know what's going to happen in the next couple months or year even. And they need to look a year ahead in order to do that planting, in order to see how much they're going to plant.

Aiden Riley [00:25:27]:
What we're probably going to see is that is going to be lessened. The farmers are going to react to the fact that, yes, there's going to be less demand, and they're most likely going to plant less. I mean, the reason there's so much surplus and there is so much surplus right now is because they planted, however many months ago in preparation for their project. Yeah. For the country to be open and that churning level of consumption. And that didn't happen. I would say that farmers around the country are ensuring that that is not going to happen again because they do not like to waste their food. Some farmer, one farmer called it like the worst day in his life, of his life, when he had to bury 5 million pounds of his produce, basically.

Aiden Riley [00:26:04]:
And, yeah, I think they're going to do everything they can within their ability. They're very, very intelligent people that we spoke to have it kind of down to a science, and it's hard to have it down to science when you don't know what data you're working with. You don't know what. What the demand is going to be. But I think they're going to do everything they can to make sure that we don't end up in a situation like we've had the last couple months with farm food waste.

Tracy Stuckrath [00:26:26]:
Right.

Tracy Stuckrath [00:26:26]:
All right, so how can people help you?

Aiden Riley [00:26:29]:
People can help us. I mean, great question. Firstly, firstly, if people want to learn more about us, they got to go to our organ. They got to go to our website, farmlink.org and there they can learn everything. They can see what we do and how we do it and they can see photos and stories from communities we've serviced. The best way they can help us then is there's also on the website, a volunteer under the Get Involved. You can click Get Involved and then depending on what it is you want to offer the way you can, you can help. You can click on that, on one of those buttons.

Aiden Riley [00:27:01]:
Whether that's you just, you want to volunteer, you want to start a fundraiser, you want to, you want to just donate on your, you want to just donate, you want to join the Facebook community so you can get updates on what we're doing. And if we say, hey, any volunteers want to go and help with this delivery here? Then you can, you can be a part of that group. That's all on the get involved section on our website that people can go find and look through themselves. And that is how we found the majority of the 170 people work with us and the 2,000 plus volunteers who have signed up and are in our Facebook group. That's how we connect with people around the country.

Tracy Stuckrath [00:27:35]:
Okay. And you know, asking that question too, there's a lot of, when events are happening, a lot of companies, when they go into a new city for their convention or whatever, they've got thousands of people or Even, you know, 50 or 100 people, corporate social responsibility. So they always want to find a fundraiser or a way to come on, you know, come to a facility, to a food bank. There's a lot of groups that go to food banks and just package food for people. Is that a way that meeting planners could potentially partner with you, is do that with their convention or their conference?

Aiden Riley [00:28:08]:
Absolutely.

Tracy Stuckrath [00:28:10]:
And that, and again, just through that volunteer link on your website.

Aiden Riley [00:28:14]:
Yes. Or if there are any organizations or companies out like who, you know, I mean, I was asked to email me personally@aidenfarmingproject.org and then we can have a personal conversation about how it is we can work together.

Tracy Stuckrath [00:28:30]:
Okay. I mean, I think it's going to be long in coming until we get a big group of people together for a convention. But you know, anything that they can do. Because I think people are, you know, wanting to do things, you know, virtually and how can their employees help do a variety of different things. So. And they're convention goers too, so it would be interesting, you know, as they do virtual events, what. How can they also give back to live projects like yours?

Aiden Riley [00:28:57]:
Yeah, completely.

Tracy Stuckrath [00:28:59]:
Okay, well, I'm, I don't want to take up any. You guys got a lot of work to do, so I appreciate your time. And on all social medias, you're just. It's Farm Link on all social media outlets.

Aiden Riley [00:29:09]:
Yeah. So on Instagram, we are Farm Link Project. And as Twitter. And Twitter as well.

Tracy Stuckrath [00:29:14]:
Okay. Farm Link Project. Gotcha project.

Tracy Stuckrath [00:29:17]:
Okay.

Tracy Stuckrath [00:29:17]:
Well, thank you so much for your time. I'm really impressed by what you guys have done. Thank you for taking bringing to life what I thought about, but I didn't jump into it and do. I actually made a donation this morning of $500 to you guys because I am really happy for what you're doing. But here in North Carolina, I think I submitted the information on how I can volunteer, but let me know what I can do while I'm sitting at home not planning meetings here in North Carolina.

Aiden Riley [00:29:47]:
Absolutely. Well, and thank you for the donation and thank you for talking to me today and kind of getting the word out. We really appreciate it.

Tracy Stuckrath [00:29:56]:
Thanks for listening to the Eating at a Meeting podcast where every meal matters. I'm Tracy Stuckrat, your food and beverage inclusion expert. Call me and let's get started right now on creating safe and inclusive food and beverage experiences for your customers, your employees, and your communities. Share the podcast with your friends and colleagues at our Eating at a Meeting Facebook page and on all podcast platforms. To learn more about me and receive valuable information, go to tracystuckrath.com and if you'd like more information on how to feed engagement, nourish inclusion, and bolster your bottom line, then visit eating@ameeting.com.

Aiden Riley [00:30:47]:
SA.