A Tale of Two Impacts: Tackling Food Insecurity and Food Waste in the United States 

For Joe Robbins, food rescue is personal. 

“Growing up, I was the oldest of six kids with a single mom,” he says. “We went to food banks my whole childhood.”

Today, as the chief product officer at Food Rescue US, Robbins oversees the development of a software platform that manages the logistics for 142,000 food pickups a year in 26 states across the country. 

“Our mission is one that really means a lot to me personally,” Robbins says. “We’re able to rescue really high-quality prepared foods.”

At Climate Week NYC, for example, Robbins recalls the team’s efforts to rescue food from the Nest Climate Campus, hosted at the Javits Center. 

“They made these beautiful quinoa and beet salads that they served to the people going to the conference,” recalls Robbins. “We were able to recover hundreds of prepackaged bowls and hand them over to a shelter that was going to serve them that night.”

Every rescue effort is a step toward mitigating the enormous challenge of food waste in the United States. While one in seven Americans experiences hunger, 40% of the food that’s grown—an astonishing 1.3 billion tons—never even makes it to the table. 

Food waste is also one of the largest and most under-addressed drivers of climate change in the United States. Most uneaten food ends up in landfills, where it decomposes anaerobically and emits methane, a greenhouse gas over 80 times more potent than CO₂ over a 20-year period. All told, food waste is responsible for more than 10% of global emissions.

The scale of the problem is daunting. But solutions are beginning to scale up, too.

Brightly: Solving for People and Climate

Operating at the intersection of food insecurity and climate change, Brightly was founded in 2023 to help nonprofit food rescue organizations quantify their climate impact and unlock a new source of funding through high-integrity carbon credits. In doing so, Brightly also enables companies to support measurable climate action while strengthening food recovery in the communities where they operate.

Brightly works with 28 nonprofit food rescue organization partners—including Food Rescue US—that recover and redistribute more than 5 billion pounds of food each year. Among their partners is Feeding America, the nation’s largest food rescue organization, which operates a network of 200 food banks and 60,000 meal programs. Brightly partners with nonprofit food rescue organizations across all 50 states and 97% of U.S. counties to measure the climate impact of keeping surplus food in the human food system and out of waste streams.

“Forty percent of food in the U.S. goes to waste, yet only 2% of that surplus food is rescued for people experiencing food insecurity,” explains Matt Jones, Brightly’s vice president of operations. “This project exists to bridge that gap. Food rescue organizations are uniquely positioned to tackle both food waste and hunger, and carbon revenue can provide the long-term financial engine to expand food rescue where it’s needed most.” 

With their intervention-based approach, Brightly enables these organizations to rescue and reroute food to people who need it; by preventing waste streams, this process also avoids methane emissions before they occur.

“We’re working toward two problems at once,” explains Ellen Schoenberg, the large donation program manager at FoodRecovery.org, another of Brightly’s partner organizations. “If you’re tackling food waste, you’re tackling food insecurity at the same time.”

However, despite these important goals, organizations can only go so far with the resources they have. 

“We are recovering and donating over a million pounds of food every single week and it’s still not enough,” Schoenberg says. “We really need policy change, we really need investment in donation transportation, and our partners need investment in facility space and refrigeration space. Really, we just need more companies like Brightly to see the value in this space.”

And recognizing this value is key to how Brightly operates. 

“We all know food rescue organizations fight hunger, but they’re also on the front lines of climate action. By keeping edible food from being thrown out, they prevent the methane emissions that make food waste one of the world’s largest climate challenges,” says Jones.

For Brightly, recognizing and quantifying that environmental impact makes it possible to unlock funding through the voluntary carbon market.

The VM0046 Methodology: Quantifying Climate Impact and Funding Food Rescue

Across Brightly’s partner organizations, the consensus is clear: the biggest challenge to scaling is finance. These organizations tend to be fully funded by grants and donations, which often means that budgets are tight. But with Brightly’s understanding of how food insecurity and food waste are intertwined, the environmental aspect—the methane reduction component—has become a powerful new driver of finance.

“For food rescue organizations that have historically depended on grants and donations, carbon credits create a new source of predictable, long-term funding that allows them to scale their impact,” says Andy Levitt, Brightly’s founder and CEO.

The voluntary carbon market (VCM) plays an important role in helping nonprofit food rescue organizations achieve this impact. Brightly developed the first U.S. project (Verra Project 4711) registered under Verra’s VM0046 Methodology for Reducing Food Loss and Waste, creating a new pathway for food rescue organizations to access carbon finance. 

Launched in 2023, VM0046 provides a rigorous framework for quantifying greenhouse gas emission reductions from activities that prevent food loss and waste across the supply chain. It provides procedures for quantifying the downstream emission reductions resulting from diverting food from a food loss and waste destination (such as a landfill) through, for example, demand planning, the use of apps to facilitate food sharing, and food bank donations.

By keeping edible food in the human food supply chain, these activities avoid the methane emissions that would otherwise result from food waste decomposition. Under VM0046, those avoided emissions can be quantified, independently verified, and converted into carbon credits.

Using this methodology, Brightly generates high-integrity carbon credits; this process creates a new, reliable source of funding for their partner food rescue organizations. 

It works according to a circular model:

Brightly’s project achieved a milestone in 2026, when it became the first to be issued credits under VM0046. With about 720,000 credits approved for issuance, this is a large-scale project that represents a significant opportunity to provide meaningful financing to the food rescue organizations that partner with Brightly.

Given the nationwide footprint and tangible community co-benefits of the participating nonprofit food rescue organizations, these credits complement removal strategies by delivering credible methane avoidance alongside longer-term decarbonization efforts. With participating food rescue organizations across the U.S., buyers can direct investment toward climate action and impact in their own communities.

“This makes for a unique opportunity in that, if there’s a buyer for these carbon credits and they’re looking for something that’s local with the environmental or social impact that can be felt locally here in the U.S., we are able to provide credits to the zip code,” says Jones. 

“Every additional dollar of carbon finance helps food rescue organizations recover more food, feed more people, and prevent more methane emissions. That’s the powerful cycle this project is designed to create,” Levitt explains.

Many food rescue organizations continue to face growing demand while operating with constrained and often uncertain funding. Carbon finance offers an opportunity to provide a more durable source of support that can strengthen their long-term capacity.

On the ground, says Levitt, “Additional carbon revenue allows food rescue organizations to invest in the people, vehicles, refrigeration, and infrastructure needed to recover more food and serve more communities.”

In other words, carbon finance channels critical funding to Brightly’s 28 partner organizations, enabling them to reinvest more in their own communities.

“We have the resources in this country to be able to make sure that no one goes to bed hungry. It’s just a matter of logistics, upfront capital, and collaboration,” says Julia DeSantis, director of sustainability at The Farmlink Project, another partner organization. “What’s so exciting about the carbon financing potential is that we can do that more sustainably.” 

Additionality and Recognized Impact

Even as Brightly’s model builds on decades of food rescue work, it is designed to ensure that the impact it generates is both measurable and new. 

For each partner organization, Brightly establishes a conservative historical baseline so that only the incremental food rescued above that baseline is credited. As Levitt explains, “We’ll only credit the delta between what they achieve each year against that baseline to ensure additionality.”

Central to the project’s operations, additionality refers to the reduction or removal of greenhouse gas emissions that is made possible by an activity that would not have occurred without the revenue from the sale of carbon credits. With a steady source of revenue from project activities, Brightly is able to create a more sustainable funding model for its partner organizations, enabling them to focus on their core mission.

Brightly’s approach also reinforces the integrity of the credits themselves. By using a conservative accounting approach paired with independent validation and verification, the project ensures that its emission reductions are real, measurable, and directly tied to activity on the ground. This emphasis on quality is reflected in Brightly’s ex ante rating of Ae from BeZero Carbon, which signifies the high likelihood of successful project execution. Brightly has also earned high ratings for additionality (AA), permanence (AAA), and project execution (AA).

Together, these elements underscore how Brightly’s model can generate immediate impact in communities across the country while also supporting long-term growth.

In recent years, this growth has accelerated for many of Brightly’s partner organizations. “We have tons of food donors and volunteers, and there’s always a need for food,” says Joe Robbins of Food Rescue US. “In the last couple of years, we have expanded significantly. We went from 15 sites in 2020 to 49 sites.”

With further funding from carbon finance, these organizations can continue expanding and building the capacity they need to rescue more food, reach more communities, and change more lives.

Sustainable Development Contributions

Verra Perspective

Food should nourish people, not produce methane in landfills. Brightly’s use of VM0046 shows how reducing food waste can deliver measurable climate impact while supporting food rescue at scale.

Liz Guinessey

Manager, Food and Blue Carbon Innovation | Verra

Client Perspective

Verra's development of VM0046 created the first rigorous framework for quantifying the climate impact of food rescue, opening the door for this overlooked solution to mitigating methane. We're proud to be the first project bringing this methodology to life, creating new funding that helps nonprofit food rescue organizations rescue more food, reduce methane emissions, and feed more people.

Matt Jones

Director of Partnerships | Brightly