Coordinating Local Growers With Food Pantries: The AmpleHarvest Experience The growing challenge of nourishing 50 million food-insecure Americans has historically been made all the more difficult because America’s 42 million home and community gardeners, 35% of all households, have been largely denied the opportunity to share their fruit, vegetables, herbs and nuts with their neighbors in need. As a result, food pantries/soup kitchens have generally offered only processed food while nearby produce was left to rot in the garden, or worse, thrown away adding to the waste stream and methane emissions at nearby trash dumps. It also turned healthy, locally grown and freshly harvested food into food waste. That is now history. Since 2009, AmpleHarvest.org has been the disruptive solution that has taken advantage of the legacy infrastructure (the food pantries and nearby growers), universally available technology (the Internet) and both the backlogged supply of fresh food and the pent up frustration of millions of growers who up to now were forced to watch the food go to waste. AmpleHarvest.org works to educate, encourage and enable growers across all 50 states to share their bounty with a local food pantry for the rest of their gardening life. This benefits an ever increasing number of participating food pantries/soup kitchens (now past 7,000) as they become visible and accessible to local growers in rural, suburban and urban communities. The “just in time” logic built into AmpleHarvest.org, arranging for food donations just before the clients arrive, eliminates the need for extra refrigeration and storage – problems that have also prevented acceptance of food donations in the past. Lastly, given the viral nature of the campaign, as each grower learns about the nearby pantry, they become a vector for further spreading that awareness to their neighbors. AmpleHarvest.org has no “boots on the ground”, no scheduled pickups and no regionalization. Indeed, AmpleHarvest.org never actually touches the food. It simply bridges the supply that has historically been in search of a need, to the desperate need that never knew a solution was already available. In the near and long term, this improves both the health and the wealth of America while also benefiting the environment – all at no cost to the donor. The magic of AmpleHarvest.org is that by moving information instead of food, we’ve moved ending food waste and hunger into the cloud.