How Leket Israel Feeds 400,000 People a Week — and How to Replicate It Where You Live | Joseph Gitler

Every week in the United States, roughly 80 million pounds of food is thrown away by restaurants, hotels, farms, and grocery stores. Not spoiled food — food that's perfectly safe and nutritious but doesn't meet cosmetic standards, arrived in surplus, or passed an arbitrary sell-by date. Meanwhile, millions of people in those same cities don't have reliable access to enough to eat.   Joseph Gitler decided it was unacceptable. Leket Israel now rescues and redistributes food at a scale that feeds 400,000 people every week. Surplus produce becomes packaged meals. Hotel banquet leftovers reach families the same day. The logistics required to do that reliably — and with dignity — are genuinely extraordinary.  This conversation is about how he built it — and how you can help start something like it where you live. Whether you want to volunteer, push for change in your own city, or build a food-rescue effort from scratch, Gitler breaks down what it actually takes to replicate the model in your community.

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Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:00

What if feeding the hungry and fighting climate change could start with yesterday's leftovers?

SPEAKER_01 0:08

We are gonna rescue this year probably in the range of 75 million pounds of fruits and vegetables. This is not a Bible lesson, but in our Bible it also talks about Baal Tashkhit not wasting. And so this is nothing new. This is in our Judeo-Christian heritage. Utilizing excess food to feed the poor is practiced everywhere in the world, but not like we do it, and sometimes not at the scale we do it. And it states, unfortunately, there's a big fear of food poisoning, and there's a big fear of lawsuits. And so people have to work with their local health authorities to say, I want this to happen. There are poor people in these communities who could benefit from this food. Most healthy, nutritious, safe, cooked food in the United States that's rescuable ends up going in the garbage. And that's really a shame. Over the years, it's been millions that we've helped, Jewish and non-Jewish alike, Muslims, Christians, Arabs, Bedouins, Druze, refugees, everyone gets served by Lekit equally.

SPEAKER_00 1:21

Welcome to Israeli Trailblazers, where bold minds turn big ideas into a better world. I'm your host, Jennifer Weisman. After years of living in Israel, I'm now back in America and I see it clearly. Israel is one of the most misunderstood countries in the world, and it's a powerhouse of innovation and world-changing ideas. And yet, most people have no clue how much Israelis contribute to the globe. Today we're talking about food, not recipes, rescuing and repurposing perfectly good food to feed the hungry and to save our planet. Israel is quietly rewriting the rule book on how the world fights hunger and saves the planet at the same time. This is where my guest comes in today, Meet Joseph Gittler. Twenty years ago, he founded Lechet Israel, the ultimate food rescue squad. We're talking millions of pounds of ugly fruit and untouched leftovers and extra produce and stopping it before they hit the landfill and rerouting it to those who need it most. This year, Lechet is feeding over 400,000 hungry people a week. So why would someone in Tallahassee or Tokyo care about what Israel is doing to rescue food? Hunger and food waste are global problems, and Israel's scrappy solution is smart and totally scalable. Many countries are flocking to Israel to replicate Lefet's food rescue business model. It's not a kindness thing, it's also a climate thing. So let's find out what Joseph started 20 years ago. Joseph, you left America, you moved to Israel, you built a life. What happened to you 20 years ago that made you decide that Lefet was something that was critical to start?

SPEAKER_01 3:13

I've actually been in Israel 25 years, and a little over 20 years ago was the height of what was called then the Second Intifada, which was a very difficult period for everyone living here in the state of Israel, a very violent period. And it changed the economy in ways that I at the time didn't understand would happen again during COVID, happening again in our current situation. And that was certain industries really dried up, hospitality, especially, because understandably people don't want to come necessarily to a country that's going through very difficult times. I started to see people knocking on my door saying, I work in hospitality, I work in a hotel, I worked in a restaurant, and because there aren't tourists, because Israelis aren't in the mood to travel, to go out, we're out of work. And that made me very sad because I want people to be able to earn a living, especially in the area that they've chosen to work in. But with all that, there were also those of us who are fortunate who continue to go to hotels, continue to go to weddings and bar and bat mitzvahs. And like anyone who's visited Israel and has stayed in a hotel, everyone comments on the same thing. There's so much food at all these events. And at the end of the event, what's happening with all this food? We've all mentioned it. We've all spoken about it. And in the Israel of the year 2002, 2003, with a growing population of people in need, there was still no one doing anything about it. Meaning it was just conversation. People mentioned, oh, look how much food is left at the end of this breakfast buffet. But that's where it ended. The food went in the garbage. And so I said to myself, this is crazy. We're living in a difficult time for so many in the state of Israel. We have this asset, very quickly depreciating asset. Food. Food is the fastest depreciating asset, I would say. And we can feed people with this food, and let's make that happen. That's really was the beginning of my journey.

SPEAKER_00 5:15

So you have an Israeli breakfast, there's all these salads, there's all this homest, there's all this whatever left over, or a wedding, or a butt mutzpa. What does leat actually do with the rescued food? How do you get it from the chafing dish into someone's home?

SPEAKER_01 5:43

Humus, I'm thrilled that you brought up because humus is another area. Humus that sat out, tricky. Okay? So in general, just to put people at ease, the food we're taking is not something that's been on the table. It might have been on the buffet, but ideally it's something that never made it out of the kitchen. And that's because caterers are always worried about running out of food. And so they'll always overproduce. In the beginning, it was all done by volunteers. Today, most of our food rescue, 20 years later, is by our own trained staff in refrigerated vans. They will pick up food from events, corporate cafeterias, army bases, and hotels, of course, and transport that food to a network of agency partners we have throughout the state of Israel, from all communities, both Jewish and non-Jewish alike, and places specifically where people eat on the spot. Okay, so we're looking for after-school clubs for kids, lunch clubs for the elderly, soup kitchens, homeless shelters, battered women's shelters, places where we can get our food quickly, efficiently, and make sure it's eaten, if not the same day, perhaps refrigerated overnight and eaten the next day.

SPEAKER_00 6:50

Let's just talk about the other side of it, which is the ugly fruit or the ag side. What does Lehet do to partner with all these farms and growers? How does that ugly fruit work in the Lechet business model?

SPEAKER_01 7:04

I'm gonna add, it's not just ugly fruits and vegetables, which are perfectly safe and nutritious, but because of, let's say, how consumers have been trained, uh, they never make it to market. So we over the years have connected with farmers, retailers, kibbutzim, moshavim, and said to them very simply, if you have crops that you're not gonna market, maybe because they're ugly, maybe because the price is low in the marketplace and they're not gonna make money by picking it. Maybe there's order cancellations, maybe there's acts of God and there's been damage to the fruit or vegetables, don't let it go to waste. There are people in need in this country who will eat this produce. And so that is a mega project. That's our biggest project. We are gonna rescue this year, probably in the range of 75 million pounds of fruits and vegetables. It's a massive, massive operation.

SPEAKER_00 7:57

75 million pounds of agriculture that would have gone to waste.

SPEAKER_01 8:02

Correct. And we can do a lot more than that. We could do double or triple that once we have the budgets in place. We have 50 to 75,000 volunteers a year who come either to pick in the fields or to repackage produce that we've gotten directly from farmers, and all that is distributed through our agency partners, over 400 agency partners who get fruits and vegetables. Some of them get it and cook it, some of them repack it and send it to families. They do whatever they're gonna do with it. The quality is a lot better. People come and think, oh, it's gonna be all awful stuff. No, it's grade B, but a lot of it's also grade A, which we've gotten because market price was low.

SPEAKER_00 8:44

What is the difference between a grade A tomato and a grade B tomato?

SPEAKER_01 8:48

So grade B tomato might be a little bigger or smaller, frankly, than when the market wants. The coloring might be slightly off. It might have a little nick on it. Maybe it got damaged in a hail storm, but often it's perfect. We had Ofra Strauss, who's the chair of Strauss, which is one of Israel's biggest food concerns, came to visit this week, and we took her to one of our refrigerators, and we had tens of tons of perfectly looking tomatoes. And even she felt like, I don't get it. Like, why is Leke getting tomatoes like this? But the answer is the tens of tons is a very small part of the amount of tomatoes that are grown in the country. So what might look like a lot to you or me, or even to her, is a small percentage of what's being sold in the market and even what's going to waste.

SPEAKER_00 9:38

Well, that's okay. Do you think you'll get to a point where you have a surplus, just way more food than you do have mouths to feed?

SPEAKER_01 9:45

Great question. It happens when we get massive amounts of one crop in a very short period of time. For example, from a couple of years ago, we got something like a thousand tons of carrots within a few weeks. Now, the nice thing about carrots is they last. Okay? We have time to distribute them. The problem is that we have other stuff coming in. We don't have unlimited space in our refrigerators. We need to get rid of it. The agencies, after a week or two of us piling on carrots, said we can't take anymore. Our people are turning orange. So that's when we made a decision, which I'm very proud of. This is about five years ago, to have a side project where we have instances like that. We'll actually go to a manufacturer and we'll make soups. We'll make frozen carrots, we'll make baby food. Today is actually a project of Lekitt where we made about a million liters of soup last year. Can we make this into something that will bring in a little bit of income to Lekitt? Because most of our income that pays our bills is coming from philanthropy, which is fine. But a lot of philanthropy loves to see do you have other business models? But it's complicated because the farmers give to us everything free of charge because we tell them we're not going to profit off of it. You know, is that gonna create something where either I have to go back to the farmers and share some of the profits with them? And that just opens a bag of a lot of hard work for us to figure out who that is. These are all good problems to have. We're very proud of the fact that we make these soups. Last year we had 3,000 tons of apples. So as the apples are overwhelming us, so then we went and we started to make applesauce and baby food.

SPEAKER_00 11:31

Food rescue can be done in every zip code in the world, correct? Israel's not unique in any particular way to having ag and having excess and sharing it with those in need. Am I right?

SPEAKER_01 11:46

That's correct. We can go back in time very far because leket is a Hebrew word. Leket shekcha upea were the biblical concepts that told farmers, the business people of ancient times, how they had to take care of the poor. So this is something in our Bible, and this is not a Bible lesson, but in our Bible it also talks about Baltashit, not wasting. And so this is nothing new. This isn't our Judeo-Christian heritage. This is something that's so commonplace. But that being said, it was never imagined in ancient times that there would be excesses that wouldn't be used. You had to tell the farmers, okay, you need to give. Modern farming doesn't require that. The the way the business is structured today is that there's so much waste. Utilizing excess food to feed the poor is practiced everywhere in the world, but not like we do it, and sometimes not at the scale we do it.

unknown 12:44

Okay.

SPEAKER_00 12:44

How would you say Israel is uniquely positioned to rescue food? And we'll talk about the climate stuff on the other side of this.

SPEAKER_01 12:54

We have some benefits that other countries might not have. I'll give an example. People listening to this can say to themselves, okay, everywhere I go in the US and Canada, it doesn't matter where you are, I'm seeing food waste. I'm at the same type of events that Joseph's talking about. I work in a company. Now, why isn't this food going to the poor? We've been fortunate is that the Ministry of Health has worked with us here, okay, to figure out practices that they're comfortable with. And unfortunately, in the United States, I'm American, I grew up in the United States. Unfortunately, there's a big fear, even though you have the same health codes, there's a big fear of food poisoning, and there's a big fear of lawsuits. And so people have to work with their local health authorities to say, I want this to happen. There are poor people in these communities who could benefit from this food. It's a challenge. It's work. Most healthy, nutritious, safe, cooked food in the United States that's rescuable ends up going in the garbage. And that's really a shame. Okay? It's so sad. There are agencies throughout the United States doing it, but they could be doing a lot more if there wasn't this fear, which comes from a reasonable place in the United States. It's a very litigious society. A big caterer will call their lawyer and their lawyer will say, What do you need this for? Right? Yeah, sure. You want to do a good deed, you want to do a mitzvah, but if something goes wrong, it could get very ugly.

SPEAKER_00 14:16

And so people So Israel is sort of uniquely positioned because the ethos behind the country is about giving back and helping and contributing and recycling in a way.

SPEAKER_01 14:29

No one wants to hear that their neighbor works a full-time job and still needs help from welfare. And if they need help from welfare, then we better make sure that we can help them. And so one of the ways to help them, literally for pennies on the dollar, is making sure that when you make an event, if you work in a catering firm, if you're a hotel owner, making sure that this perfectly good food, which literally a minute ago you were offering to your guests, I'm gonna come with a solution to you. If you accept my solution, which is refrigerated trucks which show up with professional drivers, then we're onto something here. And thankfully in Israel, it's mostly been that way.

SPEAKER_00 15:03

But this is a scalable model for every country in the world, correct? Totally.

SPEAKER_01 15:09

You need the logistics, you need the refrigeration, you need the willingness of either government or philanthropy to put their money into this. And we've been fortunate that we've had all those things come together and a very strong volunteer spirit here. When you tell people that Jews come from all over the world to volunteer in Israel, it's not just Jews, we have other groups also that come. But it's not a normal thing. Yes, there are these volunteer trips, but not like this. And that's very unique. And that helps us. That's that helps us, by the way, if I take our other project, our agricultural project, and that's something that you don't need to worry about litigation. That's something that we're spending a lot of time talking to other countries about because that's really doable everywhere, but you need to have the volunteer spirit. The fact that we have one to two thousand volunteers every week helping in the farm, helping in our distribution center to repackage stuff. Maybe you can't count on that everywhere. Now, granted, we have the right weather, we're a small country, we have a strong logistics system. It's not the same if you talk about doing that in India or in the U.S. So in the US it has to be hyperlocal. So I remember an example during COVID, places of entertainment were closed. And so you had, despite the government helping, you had new poor. We don't look at ourselves as an emergency organization. We're here the whole year helping people. But then you get these situations, war or COVID, where suddenly you have a new class of people who need temporary help. And I remember getting a message from a woman who was an opera singer in the Israeli opera. You're not gonna get rich being an opera singer, but you're gonna be reasonably compensated. But suddenly she had no work and she didn't have much savings, a single mother, and suddenly she's looking for help. And she gets it from us. And so she left us a beautiful singing message for coming to her aid, and this was temporary. And so, again, we want everyone to get out of poverty. We understand that there are some people who, no matter what you do, this is their lot in life. They're just gonna struggle to make ends meet. And so that has to be our focus. But we also, as an organization, are ready for emergencies. Unfortunately, there have been too many of them since I moved here. Yep. And we hope and pray that the current emergency that we are in will end very soon.

SPEAKER_00 17:24

For sure. It's been a terrible year and a half for Israel. No question about it. I have a question about the other side of this, which is climate change. And how do you feel that what Lefet is doing by rescuing food, how does that equate to helping save the climate?

SPEAKER_01 17:42

Food waste is a major issue. I hear something like 10% of all carbon in the atmosphere comes from food waste. That's not just from the rotting of food and landfills. That's when you look at the whole from production to transportation, food waste is a major problem. Granted, Lekit also produces carbon, our trucks, our activities, but we're still net a major benefit to the environment. Of course, we have the extra benefits of taking what would have turned into an environmental catastrophe and feeding poor people. And I'll add one layer: when Lekit has stuff that's not fit for humans, so then we send it to zoos and we send it to animals and we send it to composting. So really, we as an organization waste almost nothing. And the work that we do is doing a great job helping the environment. And people may not look at us as a pure environmental organization because we're also a trucking company, but what we do makes sense on so many levels.

SPEAKER_00 18:40

You're talking about making baby food and you're talking about feeding animals. This is pretty amazing. Do you have any idea how many people over the last 20 years LECAD has helped leave the animals out of it?

SPEAKER_01 18:51

It's such a brilliant question and such a complicated question with no really good answer because it would mean knowing, you know, how many people are coming in and out of poverty? How many people am I serving today that I was serving 20 years ago? I really hope that answers zero, but I know it isn't. We're serving now on a weekly basis over 400,000 people. So I have to assume over the years it's been millions that we've helped, Jewish and non-Jewish alike, Muslims, Christians, Arabs, Bedouins, Druze, refugees. Everyone gets served. I let it equally. That's who we are. We believe in it. We don't do it for lip service. I know in many countries in the world you wouldn't have to say that. You wouldn't have to say in Miami that the Miami Food Bank works with all sectors of Israeli sites. So that makes me sad that I need to say that. And hopefully one day that'll be so obvious to people that I won't even have to say it. But millions of people. I'm really comfortable saying that. Millions of people. Thank you for asking that. I don't think about that a lot.

SPEAKER_00 19:41

You're helping so many people downstream, upstream, from the farmers to the animals, really.

SPEAKER_01 19:49

Today our focus was mostly on what we do in the poor. But yes, the farmers, they generally think they help us more than we help them because they're giving us produce for free. But it's really a partnership because it takes trees, for instance, if you don't clear the tree, it's not good for the next growth on the tree. So when we come in and pick all the fruits off, we're actually helping the farmer. Of course, since October 7th, we've been all in helping farmers financially, with grants, with loans. We've sent over 5,000 buses of volunteers. And so in general, our focus is on feeding the poor by utilizing rescued food. But again, in when there are emergency situations, we're willing to make a slight left or right where needed to do what's needed in that time.

SPEAKER_00 20:31

Again, I don't see a reason why this business model of recycled food can't be used in other places in the world. Looking at what LefEd has done, yes, it's a different circumstance with the Israeli government support and less litigious issues. But still, to your point, if you are motivated and maybe you have private funds, there's no reason this can't be done. Am I right?

SPEAKER_01 20:56

American poverty is like Israeli poverty. It's a rich country poverty, and it's totally different, and no one's starving to death. But then you have Ghana, because Ghana was interesting. They came to visit us, the Ghanaian food bank, and there were things that they didn't think of that were so obvious. Like you're an agricultural society. How are you not doing a project like this? But of course, it's a big country, it doesn't have great roads, it doesn't have great logistics. A lot of the farmers are very small. We only have a few thousand farmers in the whole Israel. In a place like Ghana, you could have millions of farmers. How are you gonna make that happen with millions of farmers? How do you get through to them? And they're poor, right? Like if you're able to do something with their crops, certainly in the West, the rich West, everything I've spoken about is being done in some small way, but it can be scaled up dramatically. When it comes to poor countries, there are things that are happening, but they happen very differently and in different ways, and that's okay. The world is a complicated place.

SPEAKER_00 21:51

Thanks for listening. If Joseph Gitler and Levit Israel can rescue millions of meals and cut carbon emissions for the planet, imagine what's possible wherever you live. If you like this episode, please share it with friends and subscribe. I'll be back in two weeks with another episode of the Israeli Trailblazers show. Until then, I'm your host, Jennifer Weissman.