Going the Extra Mile
The National Blueprint
Food Rescue Hero already provides evidence that the underlying technology can travel. Its platform supports food-rescue organizations in communities including Pittsburgh, Philadelphia, Cleveland, Los Angeles, Chicago, Northern Virginia, Denver, Louisville and Cincinnati. The network connects more than 100 food-recovery peers, allowing organizations to share operating practices and solutions.
The national blueprint emerging from Cincinnati centers on five key ideas:
Treat hunger as a supply-chain problem. Identify where usable food exists and where unmet demand exists
Use technology to match the two in real time. Don’t depend on spreadsheets, phone calls and luck.
Turn residents into distributed infrastructure. A smartphone, a car and an hour of someone's time become part of the supply chain.
Measure everything. Pounds rescued, rescues completed, meals created, donors participating and communities reached make performance visible.
Scale the network, not just the organization. Grocery stores, restaurants, corporations, stadiums, schools, volunteers, pantries and food banks become nodes in one interconnected system.
That’s a model almost any metropolitan area could understand.
What if hunger is really a logistics problem?
Every year, Greater Cincinnati throws away an estimated 60 million pounds of food. At roughly the same time, about one in five people in the region faces food insecurity. Put those numbers next to each other and the problem looks different.
What if America doesn’t have only a food problem? What if it has a delivery problem.
That is the Big Idea behind Cincinnati’s Last Mile Food Rescue, a nonprofit that is taking a decidedly businesslike approach to one of America's most persistent social problems.
Its premise is remarkably simple: Hunger is a logistics problem.
And Cincinnati may be proving that it can be solved.
Think Uber, But for Food
Last Mile doesn’t operate like a traditional food bank. It has built a technology-enabled logistics network connecting businesses with excess food, volunteers with cars and community organizations that know where that food is needed.
A grocery store has surplus produce.
A corporate cafeteria has prepared meals left after lunch.
A stadium has food remaining after a game.
Instead of throwing it away, a volunteer receives an opportunity through the Last Mile app, claims the rescue, picks up the food and delivers it to a nonprofit organization. The app provides instructions and connects the volunteer to Last Mile's dispatch operation. Volunteers can choose rescues based on their location and schedule.
In other words, Last Mile has applied the technology and thinking behind modern last-mile commerce to hunger relief.
The concept isn’t unique to Cincinnati, but what Cincinnati has built around that technology offers an important case study in how the model can scale.
From Zero to 20 Million Pounds
The numbers tell the story. Last Mile began operating in November 2020.
Today, its live impact counter shows that the organization has rescued more than 20.7 million pounds of surplus food.
In 2025 alone, Last Mile rescued 5.4 million pounds, the equivalent of approximately 4.4 million meals, working with 606 food donors, 268 partner agencies and more than 900 volunteers.
Those volunteers completed more than 21,000 individual rescues.
And the organization says the food it has moved represents more than $70 million in free food delivered into the community.
The operation has grown approximately 30 percet annually since its launch. That’s not simply charitable growth. It's scale.
The P&G Idea Behind Last Mile
One reason the model is interesting to the business community is the person running it.
CEO and co-founder Eileen Budo isn’t a career hunger-relief executive, she is a logistics expert.
Budo began her career as an Air Force officer before spending 28 years at Cincinnati-based Procter & Gamble, where she worked in procurement and supply chain operations. Among her accomplishments, she built P&G's first centralized procurement shared service, helping bring a fragmented global manufacturing network into a more coordinated system.
When Budo co-founded Last Mile, she saw a familiar problem. On one side was supply: enormous quantities of usable food. On the other was demand: people who needed it.
The missing piece was an efficient system connecting the two.
In August, Forbes named Budo to its 2026 “50 Over 50: Impact” list, highlighting her decision at age 57 to apply decades of supply-chain experience to food insecurity.
Her experience raises an interesting question for Cincinnati's business community.
What if some of society’s biggest problems need more operating expertise, not simply more philanthropy?
Don’t Build Another Warehouse. Build a Network
This may be the most important lesson in the Last Mile model. Traditional thinking says that growth requires more infrastructure: more buildings, more trucks, more employees.
Last Mile adds another lever: unused community capacity.
A volunteer already has a car.
A grocery store already has food.
A pantry already knows the people who need it.
Technology connects them.
That changes the economics of growth.
Last Mile says donated food combined with volunteer labor can generate a 10-times return on investment. It also provides transportation that saves recipient agencies money they otherwise would spend on drivers, vehicles and fuel.
The organization has added refrigerated vehicles for large loads, but its secret weapon remains the distributed network of ordinary people making individual rescues.
One carload doesn’t solve hunger, but thousands of carloads begin to change a food system.
Cincinnati Becomes the Laboratory
Last Mile is now setting a much larger goal.
The organization believes rescuing 15 million pounds of food annually could close Greater Cincinnati's hunger gap and is building toward that level by the end of the decade.
Think about what that would mean.
Cincinnati wouldn’t simply have created another successful nonprofit.
It would have demonstrated, at metropolitan scale, how a city can use logistics, technology, corporations, volunteers and existing nonprofits to dramatically reduce the disconnect between wasted food and hunger.
And that makes Cincinnati valuable as a laboratory.
The city already has pieces that other markets could replicate: major food retailers, sophisticated supply-chain expertise, strong corporate philanthropy, neighborhood nonprofits and a community accustomed to public-private partnerships.
It also has a broader food-rescue ecosystem. Last Mile and Cincinnati-based La Soupe announced closer coordination this year, combining complementary approaches to getting excess food where it can do the most good.
The goal isn’t to replace food banks, pantries or other hunger organizations. It's to make the entire network work better.
The Bigger Cincinnati Idea
There is another lesson here, and it reaches well beyond food.
Cincinnati is a city filled with people who spent careers solving difficult problems for some of America's largest companies.
Supply chains. Consumer behavior. Branding. Manufacturing. Data. Technology. Finance.
Imagine applying more of that expertise to homelessness, transportation, education, workforce development or other seemingly intractable civic problems. Last Mile Food Rescue offers a case study in what can happen when someone does.
Budo took the principles used to make global supply chains work and applied them to a basic human problem in her own hometown.
The result is not a perfect solution to hunger. Nor is food rescue by itself a substitute for addressing the economic conditions that cause food insecurity.
But Cincinnati is demonstrating something important – Food can be rescued instead of discarded.
Technology can mobilize thousands of people.
Existing community resources can become infrastructure.
And an enormous social problem can become more manageable when somebody changes the question.
Instead of asking how do we find enough food to feed everyone, Last Mile Food Rescue is asking how to get the food we already have to the people who need it?
That is a logistics question. And Cincinnati is working on the answer with Last Mile Food Rescue.