“I've worked in public health, social justice, environmental activism, and community organizing. All endeavors striving for healthier communities, all tied to the same desire to improve the world around me” says Robin Franz Martin. Robin’s career started with the NAACP, leading a campaign for environmental justice and urban health issues in Ypsilanti. Since then she's worked at the Education Development Center in Boston on public health issues and co-founded a summer camp for middle school children aimed at fostering personal and social change through exposure to sustainable agriculture and healthy food options. Robins latest endeavor is as Executive Director of the Silicon Valley Food Rescue at Joint Venture Silicon Valley, where she is head of the A La Carte pilot program.

A La Carte is a fleet of trucks that gather prepared food from college and tech campuses in Silicon Valley. The trucks deliver the food to neighborhoods with a high density of food-insecure families. Robin explains why this model is perfect for the area; “It’s so unique to Silicon Valley to have huge quantities of prepared food wasted every day. There are groups of adults all over the county, at tech companies and universities, that are being fed on a large scale like nowhere else on Earth.” This can create a lot of food waste. Santa Clara County (one of the counties where A La Carte is currently deployed) found that more than 34 million pounds of edible food went to landfills each year. Meanwhile, almost 190,000 people in that county are food insecure. The problem was getting wasted food from these institutions to the people that needed it.

Robin led A La Carte’s pilot launch in September 2018 with Stanford University. Back then they had just one truck. In less than a year, Robin and A La Carte have recovered 312,000 pounds of food waste and delivered over 260,000 meals to the food insecure population of Silicon Valley. In that short time they have grown considerably. They now gather prepared food from Facebook, Stanford University, and other smaller companies. Additional collection programs, complete with their own refrigerated A La Carte trucks and drivers, will start on several other large company campuses and an airport in the next few months.