Berry Recovery Project: Connecting Surplus Fruit with Community Need

Not every berry grown for the commercial market ultimately reaches it.

A buyer can fall through. Fruit can remain in storage. Berries may be separated during sorting because of size, color or weight. In the field, fruit may remain between commercial harvests, have cosmetic differences or become uneconomical to harvest when labor is limited.

Through the Berry Recovery Project, we worked to create another pathway for some of that fruit—connecting berry growers and processors with organizations equipped to recover and redistribute it within their communities.

Building a bridge between farms and food recovery

The Berry Recovery Project was developed around two connected challenges: food waste and food access.

Food-recovery organizations already had volunteers, community relationships and systems for redistributing harvested food. Berry growers had fruit that, under certain circumstances, could no longer move through normal commercial channels.

Connecting the two was not always straightforward.

Commercial berry farms operate within food-safety requirements and established on-farm practices. Liability concerns and unfamiliarity with commercial production could also make it difficult and time-consuming for volunteer organizations to gain access to berry fields.

The Berry Recovery Project created a bridge between those groups.

NBF worked with participating food-recovery organizations around food-safety training and berry-harvesting protocols, then used its relationships within the Pacific Northwest berry industry to connect trained and endorsed volunteer harvest groups with interested farms.

Making field recovery work in commercial agriculture

Recovering fresh fruit from a commercial field required more than assembling a group of volunteers.

Participating crews needed to understand the protocols, standards and rules of the farms where they were working, including applicable Good Agricultural Practices (GAP), Food Safety Modernization Act (FSMA) requirements and other food-safety and on-farm protocols.

The project was designed to give growers greater confidence in the organizations entering their fields while giving food-recovery groups a clearer pathway into commercial berry agriculture.

Fresh-fruit recovery could become an option when a field needed to be cleaned between commercial harvests, when berries had cosmetic differences such as size or color, or when labor availability and harvesting costs meant that commercially harvesting the remaining fruit no longer made sense.

After harvesting, participating groups could deliver recovered fruit to food-redistribution centers for distribution within their communities.

Creating pathways for fresh and processed fruit

Berry Recovery was not limited to fruit remaining in the field.

The project also created a pathway for growers and processors when a buyer unexpectedly fell through, inventory remained unsold or sorting resulted in fruit being separated because of color, size or weight.

We helped coordinate the pickup and redistribution of surplus processed, shelf-stable and frozen berries through food-distribution organizations.

The project also recognized another practical concern for commercial growers: protecting the reputation associated with their products.

When imperfect fruit was suitable for donation but a grower or processor did not want branded packaging associated with it, the program provided a way for donated fruit to be repacked into containers without the company’s logo before redistribution.

Together, the fresh and processed pathways acknowledged that surplus could occur at different points in berry production—and that recovering it required different solutions.

A connection that worked for both sides

For growers, Berry Recovery offered another possibility when usable fruit might otherwise remain unharvested or outside its normal commercial market.

For food-access organizations, the project offered connections to commercial berry farms alongside training intended to make those relationships more workable within the industry’s food-safety and on-farm expectations.

One participating grower described that experience simply:

Building connections around a shared need

The Berry Recovery Project approached food recovery as more than the movement of surplus fruit from one place to another.

It required collaboration between growers, processors, volunteer harvest groups and food-distribution organizations—groups that operated in different environments but could contribute to addressing the same need.

Our role was to help make those connections more practical within the realities of commercial berry production, from food-safety expectations and field protocols to matching organizations with growers and coordinating different types of fruit recovery.

The project became one example of how relationships already present across the Pacific Northwest berry industry could be used to connect agricultural resources with needs beyond the farm.