Nashville Food Bank Creates Frozen Meals

by Hanna Raskin, Posted Feb 2nd 2010 @ 12:00PM

frozen vegetables Photo: stevendepolo, flickr

Even before the recession hit, food banks nationwide were struggling to collect the donations they needed to provide their clients with complete meals.

"With the takeovers and mergers in the food industry, producers got much more efficient," Larry Reynolds, vice president of food resources for the Second Harvest Food Bank of Middle Tennessee, explains.

While food banks don't shun the canned cranberry sauce and cereal boxes collected by well-meaning church groups and elementary schools, they've long relied on industrial donations – overruns and errors, mostly – to fill their pantries with protein-rich items. But as producers cut down on waste in the mid-1990s, all they had to spare were samples of failed food trials.

"A lot of stuff we got was snacks and sugaries," Reynolds says. "New cookies, new crackers, new sports drinks. It's not exactly nutritious."

So in 1993, Second Harvest started experimenting with making its own line of healthy frozen-meal pouches, repurposing huge amounts of tomato paste, ground beef and other ingredients that would be hard to unload as stand-alones. The program, recently featured in the Tennessean, now produces 700,000 meals annually.

The meals include chili, pasta with meat sauce, chicken a la king and turkey a la king. And according to Reynolds, they're all delicious.

"We made the decision early on that if it doesn't taste good, we're not going to serve it," says Reynolds, a veteran of the T.G.I.Friday's restaurant chain.

Second Harvest's Nashville branch wasn't the first food bank to toy with cook-and-chill technology. But Reynolds believes his agency was the first to realize the program could serve as more than a job-training opportunity for ex-cons.

"We were at the tip of the surfboard," Reynolds says.

Second Harvest manufactures some two-pound pouches, but focuses on four-pound servings aimed at eating centers. ("We try to avoid the word 'soup kitchen'," Reynolds says.) That's because few distribution centers have enough freezers to store Second Harvest's family-sized meals.

"We make a heating element available to agencies that allows them to walk into a classroom setting and be serving within an hour and a half," Reynolds says. "It's pretty elegant."

"I know this sounds gushy," he adds, "but I feel really fortunate to have found a community that supports this."

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Tags: food bank, frozen food, frozen meals, nashville, second harvest