Manna Food Center

The Challenge

Manna Food Center is highly-regarded for its decades-long food distribution, education and advocacy work to eliminate hunger in Montgomery County, Maryland. More recently, Manna launched the Community Food Rescue network, which uses innovative technology to find perfectly good food that local businesses or farms would have thrown away, and dispatch volunteers to deliver it to agencies serving people experiencing hunger. Manna came to us to help them raise awareness of food waste in the county and inspire food businesses and members of the public to get involved in their new program.

Our Work

We knew we’d need to do something big to get wide-spread attention for Community Food Rescue, so we worked with Manna to develop a week’s worth of events to inspire action and spotlight ways the community can come together to tackle food waste and hunger. Our team organized and promoted Community Food Rescue Week’s grand finale event, “No Waste, Big Taste”, a competition challenging local chefs to create delicious dishes made using food recovered from area farms and grocers. We staged the event at a busy farmers’ market, engaged local political celebrities, food bloggers, and community leaders as assistant chefs and judges, recruited local TV stations as media sponsors, and did extensive outreach to reporters and bloggers to ensure the broadest possible exposure.

The Results

Our media strategy delivered nearly a dozen media placements including a 15-minute TV segment ahead of the week’s events that featured Manna’s CEO and a Community Food Rescue farmer. We secured interviews for Manna with local public radio, TV, and online outlets, and three local broadcast stations covered the cooking competition. The fun, well-organized, and highly-promoted event contributed to an uptick in participating Community Food Rescue food businesses and volunteers, and solidified relationships with Manna’s existing supporters.