“One rescue can keep good food out of the waste stream while helping feed people at the same time,” says Robert Lee, founder and CEO of Rescuing Leftover Cuisine (RLC). “People sometimes assume we’re in the business of producing more food or funding more meals, but that’s not really it. The food already exists. It’s already been cooked, it’s already good, and it’s sitting in a walk-in or a hotel pan with nowhere to go.”
Plenty of perfectly good food disappears into the waste stream while many still wonder where their next meal will come from. For years, RLC has been battling this tragic irony, and on October 9, the nonprofit will turn that contradiction into a reason to gather.
Founded in 2013, RLC works to recover excess food from businesses and move it to community organizations serving people experiencing food insecurity. The work is not just environmental, though the waste reduction matters. It is also deeply human.
This fall, the nonprofit’s inaugural food festival and fundraiser, Taste of RLC, is set to bring supporters together at Midtown Loft & Terrace in Manhattan for an evening built around fundraising, community, and the straightforward idea that when surplus food is redirected with care and speed, it can fill stomachs instead of landfills.
A Costly Logistics Failure
As a student at NYU, Lee volunteered with the student group called Two Birds One Stone, delivering leftover food from college dining halls to nearby shelters. “The first few times, it just felt like a good deed. But after doing it week after week, the math started to bother me: we’re a country that throws away close to 40% of the food we produce, and at the same time people a few blocks away don’t have enough to eat,” he says. “I saw that it was not a scarcity problem, and it was a logistics failure. Once I saw it that way, it was hard to unsee.”
As the child of Korean immigrants in Queens, Lee lived through food insecurity firsthand, often skipping meals as his family struggled to keep up with rent—so this issue hits close to home. “Knowing what it feels like to go without makes it hard to watch good food get thrown out,” he says. After graduating, he went into finance to earn enough, fast enough to change his family’s economic prospects permanently. But the problem of food waste—and the idea that would eventually grow into RLC—kept nagging at the back of his mind. “Leaving finance to build RLC full-time was really coming full circle,” he says, “using what I learned growing up to make sure other neighbors don’t have to go through what my family did.”
Over the past 13 years, RLC has grown its scale to operate in nine regions across the country, partnering with food donors, volunteers, and nonprofit recipients to keep usable food in circulation. The organization reports that it has rescued more than 24 million pounds of food and provided more than 20 million meals since its founding. Each pickup has a simple but powerful premise: the food already exists; the challenge is making sure it gets where it is needed in time.
This is where RLC believes its approach stands apart. The organization is designed to accommodate a broad range of food types and quantities, while its technology supports convenient scheduling, real-time donation tracking, and impact reporting. RLC uses a custom web app that functions like a marketplace for food rescue, connecting places with leftover food with volunteer “rescuers” and a nonprofit partner to receive it. “Technology is the engine that allows us to operate at scale with incredible speed and agility,” Lee says. “That’s really the innovation: not new food, but a system efficient enough to move existing food from where it’s wasted to where our neighbors need it, at the speed food actually has to move.”
A Fundraising Food Tasting Experience
Taste of RLC brings the organization’s year-round mission into the spotlight for one night of food, recognition, and fundraising. The evening will celebrate the people and partners helping build a less wasteful food system, while also raising funds for RLC’s work across the city and beyond. Guests can look forward to tastings from various cuisines such as Indian flavors from Bukhara Grill to Japanese flavors from Ikigai NYC (recently featured on National Geographic’s Best of the World) and much more!
The evening starts with a VIP Reception at 5 p.m. with general admission opening at 6 p.m. Guests are able to purchase VIP tickets to get early access to all tasting stations and network with the honorees of the evening. These honorees will be receiving RLC’s first ever Impact Maker Award, to celebrate their commitment to our community. A full list of restaurant partners and honorees will be announced in the coming weeks.
For a city that takes dinner seriously, that is a compelling invitation: show up hungry, discover a few new favorites, support a worthy cause, and leave with a sharper understanding of what happens after the plate is cleared. Food rescue is often framed as a back-of-house problem, a matter of logistics and loading docks. RLC makes the case that it is also a whole-community practice—one with room for restaurants, businesses, volunteers, donors, and diners.
Taste of RLC takes place October 9 at Midtown Loft & Terrace in New York City. Doors open at 5 p.m. for the VIP reception with early access to tasting stations, specialty cocktails, and time with sponsors and award nominees. General admission opens at 6 p.m. Sign up to volunteer or buy your tickets.
