(tranquil music) - There's so much food in the world.

It's not that we need to grow way, way, way more food but it has to be viable for a farmer to harvest it and then there has to be some means for people to get it once the farmers have harvested it.

- We waste a lot of food.

Even us framers, a lot of food is wasted on the fields.

So there is a lot of waste unfortunately.

When I picked, This is Delicata squash.

I may have left it behind.

It may have been eaten by pests.

- Every year, there's a huge amount of waste that comes off of farms.

People do their best to market what they can.

Markets are fickle.

Sometimes people have a contract and it's a handshake agreement that just falls apart.

Other times, people are just gambling and they don't know what people are gonna buy and so they're growing what they think they can sell.

But they hardly ever sell everything that they grow.

- Farming has affected how I view food.

Now I know how hard it is to farm.

So I waste way less food 'cause I know how important it is.

And I try to tell people, you're wasting water there, you're wasting energy there when you throw away food.

- Rescuing food is one of the biggest sources of food that we access for hungry Minnesotans.

So it comes from a lot of different areas.

We work with food shelves and meal programs to help coordinate the rescue from retailers, from grocery stores, from convenience stores, from farmers to make sure that we're using every ounce of food that we can.

We rescue about 40 million pounds of food every year.

And really it is primarily fresh, healthy, delicious food and that's why it's such an important source of food for us.

- To some folks, one person's trash is another's treasure.

So the idea of taking food that is in a supply chain gone awry or a surplus in a glut of a harvest season but the integrity of the food is still there.

We can do something with that.

So we are recovering ingredients through our Meal Connect app, which helps food service institutions with food that might go to waste.

It redirects that, channels it into a phone app and we can recover that food and get it to one of our production kitchens.

So the idea of high-quality food that has been misrouted or misallocated, it can come to us and we can do great things with it.

Mitigating waste in the environment, I think that's really important.

So thinking about on the farm rescue, what we're able to do with it is pretty astonishing and pretty great.

- It's part of our responsibility to this environment to limit food waste but it's a win-win for us because we can rescue that.

We save it from the landfill.

And that is a way to provide fresh, healthy meals to so many communities that need it.