(light music) - Minnesota Central Kitchen is a collaboration of chefs, restaurateurs, food service professionals, food recovery, furloughed hospitality industry workers, and a need to make meals in response to COVID-19.

Chowgirls Catering Company where we're standing right now, approached Second Harvest and said, "We have workers who wanna work.

All of our big events, weddings, conferences et cetera have canceled.

We have food that will soon go to waste.

What can we do to help?"

Two-and-a-half days later we produced about 2,500 meals.

That same week that we were talking with Chowgirls, Loves & Fishes came to the table and said, "We can be your distribution point."

So that partnership then has grown into other like-minded community organizations that work with, to ensure that this Minnesota Central Kitchen meals make it out to all those in need, from families who are food insecure to different cultural organizations throughout the greater Twin Cities, who have food and cultural ethnic preferences and their dietary preferences, we want to make sure that we're acknowledging that, and servicing those needs as much as possible.

About 70% of our ingredients are rescued or sourced through the food bank donation channels.

So we're doing on-farm food recovery all the way through big box, broadliners and retailers all the way through federally subsidized food bank ingredients.

So if there is food service that we could recover and turn into our meals, we want to be able to capture that and build it into one of the Minnesota Central Kitchen meals.

Minnesota Central Kitchen meals are philanthropically funded so we have individual donors, donor advised funds, family foundations, corporations, state and federal COVID relief dollars come together, and through those different funders we're able to produce 25,000 meals a week.

Across our 12 kitchens we have re-employed about 180 cooks, chefs, to re-engage with making these meals for Minnesota Central Kitchen.

So in terms of other disparities within the food system and the food sector, you know, creating job opportunities within this program, we will have re-employed approximately 190 food service workers.

Those are folks that would, probably not otherwise have a job right now.

They're making meals for people in our community and have made a million meals in this year alone.

So addressing some of those disparities and missed opportunities because of Covid, we want this program to be able to address some of those, and to the best of our ability create opportunity instead of disparity with COVID-19.