Feed the Fridge: An Award-Winning Initiative Tackles Local Hunger
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Mark Bucher in front of a newly placed community refridgerator from Feed the Fridge.
Visionary food industry pro Mark Bucher creates an industry collaboration that’s a win-win in feeding hungry families and keeping DC area restaurants in business
By Susan Able
“Feed the Fridge is a disruptive approach to solving hunger,” said Mark Bucher. And I heard more in our recent conversation about his revolutionary concept and his work toward ensuring that “anyone who needs a meal gets a meal.”
Bucher’s LinkedIn profile says “Entrepreneur, Restaurateur and Advocate for others” and it’s on the money as a description of his life’s work. In September, the 2021 RAMMY Good Neighbor Award went to Bucher for his efforts to create Feed the Fridge; other accolades and recognition are pouring in.
Co-owner of Medium Rare, the French bistro known for its steak frites, Bucher is not a chef but a food entrepreneur with deep industry experience, including founding and selling the BGR burger restaurant. The food industry drew him in because he always had a passion for food, more as art than sustenance. He was drawn to artistic chefs, to the emotion and business end of that kind of creativity.
Feed the Fridge is a robust upstart, an effort to react immediately to getting people food, with a target audience of children and teens. Over 14 years ago, Bucher and the Medium Rare team started a program that invited DC-area residents to bring their Thanksgiving turkeys to Medium Rare where they would be cooked for free. Deep-frying a turkey takes about 20 minutes for a restaurant, but can be an unwieldly and dangerous endeavor for a home cook. It seemed like a great way to help people, especially elders and those without the resources to manage a big bird that they may have gotten through donation. Bucher walked to his car after the first year of turkey cooking and found a piece of paper tucked on his car windshield. It wasn’t a ticket, but a handwritten note thanking him, saying that without his help there would have been a family without a Thanksgiving dinner. That affected Bucher deeply and he committed to doing more.
When the COVID shutdown struck and the Medium Rare restaurants were closed, Bucher, who by this time was cooking hundreds of turkeys a year, found an outdoor venue for the turkey-cooking mission, and with the partnership of the Washington Nationals was able to cook outside at Nats Park. Last year, they cooked over 1,200 turkeys.
But with COVID shutdowns reducing food access across the board, he saw problems everywhere. Restaurants were suffering, staff were being laid off and, as he told me, “I was very dialed in to people, especially seniors. I put a tweet out early in the COVID shutdown: If [there were] any older people who couldn’t get out, they could get a meal free of charge. We got such a response and helped as many as we could, 146 drivers volunteered to help us deliver the food. That effort cost about $30K in food, and we just covered it. We didn’t have donors, but we knew we needed donors to continue. But we got the word out and people were saying ‘How can we help?’ and we got donations to help us cover our food costs and keep our staff. At that time, our restaurants were closed and outside dining hadn’t started. And I pledged, no matter what, to keep food going out.”
He explained his concept and the vision: “We had started hearing from families who needed food, needed meals. By then it was August of 2020, and the school systems decided, after a lot of back and forth, to go virtual. My first thought was, ‘So, no school lunches. Where are these kids going to get food?’”
Bucher and his team reached out to local school jurisdictions and asked about their plan to feed the children who normally ate at school. There was no plan.
Suddenly the dots connected for him. The DC school system and others were suggesting that schoolchildren go to nearby Parks and Recs centers for internet access to do their virtual learning. What if they placed refrigerators there with food? What if they got enough donations to have be able to pay other restaurants to prepare meals?
Bucher’s 13th Annual Turkey Deep Fry Event will take place on Thanksgiving morning at the Medium Rare location in Cleveland Park.
He’d always been inspired by the work of DC Central Kitchen and by the work of his friend and neighbor José Andrés, founder of World Central Kitchen. André told Bucher what he envisioned might be hard, but encouraged him and said, “Just go do it. Go get it done.”
And so, Bucher did get it done. He thought about putting refrigerators at the Parks and Rec centers and other community spots. Bucher reached out to the Washington Nationals, since there were no fans in the stands, and was immediately lent six unused refrigerators. He covered the beer decals with positive affirmation stickers (Because You Matter, Because We Care) and launched Feed the Fridge. The first fridge went to the Takoma Park Rec Center, then a broader rollout started in DC. And Bucher got them filled with meals.
Part two was involving partner restaurants. Many restaurants were eager to help Feed the Fridge. They were paid $6 per meal to create healthy meals consisting of six to eight ounces of lean protein plus vegetables or fruits and a healthy carb. Bucher’s team researched the optimum nutrition that young people need by talking to the Academy of American Pediatrics, and this balance was created for optimum health and metabolic sustainment. The kind of food that young people need.
Quickly, Feed the Fridge expanded to DC Parks and Rec sites, then DC public schools, then Latin American Youth Center and MoCo public schools.
And what was the response?
For Bucher that was the game changer—if you are hungry, take a meal. And all the things people warned him about and worried about haven’t happened: No one has vandalized a fridge, stolen all the food, hoarded the food or damaged it. In fact, just the opposite happened. Bucher has found that communities have been respectful, and enjoyed the “no signups, just go get it” policy of Feed the Fridge. He told me, “We have a refrigerator outside the Smithsonian Anacostia Center; it’s been beautifully maintained by the community. In the winter, someone cleared it of snow and dug out a path to it.”
For many people, solving an immediate hunger problem would be enough. But Bucher is as proud of the positive impact on the restaurant community. He knows the power is there for restaurants to solve hunger. “We have the nutritional guidelines, we know how to source healthy food, and I knew we could make it better.”
“I wanted this to be a win-win and it was. We fed hungry people, and to kept our restaurants alive—for a community to thrive, for a restaurant community to be solid—we need restaurants to not turn over or close. They need to be able to stay around. So the answer during COVID was to find alternate restaurant revenue sources. And that was Feed the Fridge. One small restaurant, the Pie Shop DC, made over a thousand meals a week. My proudest moment? No restaurant we worked with went out of business. That’s my win too.”
Bucher knew that DC restaurants had plenty of capacity to deliver and could also do a great job creating high-quality meals. He firmly believes that restaurants have the ability to solve hunger using partnerships like this, fully utilizing a restaurant’s capacity and talents and also helping them meet revenue goals.
I asked Bucher how the program is going to keep going, and he told me it’s complicated but also simple: They need local government support.
“When we were fully masked as a DC community, people were very generous and donations poured in, but as we moved about more freely and began unmasking, donations slowed. We’ve had a few donations from foundations, but grant cycles are slow and I have to feed people tomorrow. Luckily, we started getting corporate sponsorships. But we are still privately funded by foundations, corporations and individuals. Even though local politicians have been generous in their applause, the response to getting us more funding by local governments have been embarrassingly slow. We’ve had no support, not one penny from the DC government—and we’ve spent a million dollars in the city feeding hungry kids and seniors.”
He’s buying new fridges now, with the help of corporate sponsors. “Each fridge costs about $1,000 and it comes with a five-year warranty. To keep each fridge full of meals takes about $100K a year and we are trying to match up with donors who are willing to give. Every single dollar from individual donors goes to buying food, nothing for our overhead. We are raising corporate dollars for that.”
Bucher has continued to get support from the Nationals (the only local sports team that has been willing to help), and has included a $5,000 donation for school supplies that also went into the fridges this fall. Bucher also lauded the work and collaboration The Washington Home, a DC nonprofit that serves the elderly, which he describes as “tops” in helping him connect to food-insecure seniors.
Recently, calls have been coming in from other cities including Miami, New York and the Los Angeles school district; that has helped Bucher set his sights on expanding the program nationally, especially if the Feed the Fridge efforts can be backed up by local government funding.
But right now, he’s laser focused on the DC metro area and his goal is to deliver over 500,000 free, nutritious meals prepared by local restaurants.
Bucher believes that the Nationals will help him provide a space to cook turkeys this year, and he and his restaurant collaborators will also make 50,000 Thanksgiving meals. If you are looking to help, Feed the Fridge will need volunteers to drive and deliver during the holidays.
Does Mark Bucher relax? He laughed and told me, “No, I’m a man with four daughters. I keep busy all the time.”
Ready to donate or offer to help during the holidays? Go to feedthefridge.org and click donate. For opportunities for volunteering or driving, contact@feedthefridge.org.
