Four Insights: What Business Leaders Can Learn from Food Rescue Logistics 

August 10, 2026

By Eileen Budo, CEO, Last Mile Food Rescue

Greater Cincinnati throws away an estimated 60 million pounds of food every year. In the same region, roughly one in five people don’t know where their next meal is coming from. Put those two facts side by side and the conclusion is unavoidable: this is not a scarcity problem. It’s a distribution problem. And distribution problems can be solved. 

That distinction is about to matter more, not less. Federal changes to SNAP (the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program) are set to tighten eligibility and reduce benefits for many households in the coming months, which means the gap between food that exists and food that reaches people is about to widen at exactly the moment we can least afford it. 

I spent 28 years in supply chain leadership at Procter & Gamble, and before that, I served as an Air Force officer. When I co-founded Last Mile Food Rescue in 2020, I didn’t bring a background in hunger relief. I brought a background in solving problems and moving things efficiently from where they are to where they’re needed. It turns out that’s exactly the skill set this challenge requires. 

Recovering even 25% of what our city currently wastes would be enough to close the hunger gap here. We’ve built our organization around that logistics reframe, and it’s working: we’ve rescued more than 20 million pounds of food since 2020, growing volunteer and fleet capacity by 25 – 30% year over year. 

Here’s what I’ve learned running a food rescue operation like a supply chain — and what I think translates to any operating leader, in any sector. 

1. Diagnose the blockage before you fund a solution 

For decades the default response to hunger has been to add more supply: more food drives, more purchasing, more warehouse space. But when we look closely at the system, scarcity wasn’t the constraint. Logistics was. Perfectly good, perishable food was going to waste not because there wasn’t enough of it, but because no one had built the connective tissue to move it where it was needed, fast enough.  

Name the actual blockage before you write the check. That’s systems thinking. Funding more of the same is symptom management.

2. The last mile is the least standardized – and the most important  

Every supply chain leader knows the final leg of delivery is the hardest to control. Ours runs on two complementary systems: an owned fleet of refrigerated vehicles that handles roughly 40 percent of our total pounds rescued (large-distressed loads, large volume rescues going slightly longer distances) and a distributed network of volunteers using their own vehicles for the remaining, more frequent, smaller-batch pickups.  

This is a familiar structure in commercial logistics: a core owned fleet for guaranteed capacity, paired with a flexible, distributed network for the variable, hyper-local work. It’s part of how major parcel and grocery delivery operators run today, for the same reasons we do – the last mile doesn’t scale on owned assets alone, and it doesn’t scale on ad hoc capacity alone. You need both deployed against the right kind of load.  

3. Don’t undervalue your distributed workforce 

The instinct in most organizations is to treat volunteers, gig workers, or contractors as a “nice to have” – flexible labor you can turn on and off. That framing under sells what they really are: capacity multipliers. Our volunteer drivers are the reason we can move food from donor to recipient, at no cost, in less than an hour. They’re also our most visible ambassadors – the daily face of Last Mile to our food donors, partner agencies, and the community. 

In a lot of companies, the people doing the actual last-mile work are invisible internally — the nameless subcontractor, the unnamed driver. But they’re the face of the company to the person on the other end of the delivery. Treat that relationship as central, not incidental.

4. Define what “finished” looks like – with a number and a date 

We recently passed 20 million pounds of rescued food, and it was worth celebrating. But a milestone isn’t an endpoint. We’ve said publicly that Cincinnati will be the first American city to solve food insecurity, and we have attached a number to that ambition: recovering enough rescued food annually to meet the full unmet need in our city. That figure is what drives our strategic planning, not the other way around. 

 Attach a number and a date, and a goal becomes a plan. Leave them off, and it’s just a hope. 

The larger point  

Hunger is a logistics problem, and logistics problems get solved. Not addressed, not managed, solved.   

Cincinnati is grappling with how it will grow. The operational planning should include acknowledgement that when people aren’t hungry they learn better, work better, are healthier, and are more able to participate in the economic development of the city. Solving food insecurity isn’t just a social good.  

I would welcome a conversation with any business or civic leader thinking through this challenge – in Cincinnati or anywhere else.