Bread Break Food Harvest

The Mission of Bread Break is to feed people, support businesses and organizations, and reduce waste. Bread Break accomplishes that mission by working with restaurants and cafeterias to collect perfectly good, unused prepared food, freeze it, and distribute it to ministry centers which feed those in need. 30 volunteers run 22 routes around the greater Sioux Falls area each week. They collect 6000 pounds of food from 48 providers and distribute it to 41 recipients. Together, they are Bread Break.

Our Three Layers of Benefits:

Reduce Food Waste- Estimates are that 8 million pounds of food is currently thrown away each year in a the city the size of Sioux Falls.  Bread Break has been able to harvest and use 250,000 pounds of that each of the past three years. Total over our lifespan we have saved nearly 1.5million pounds from our landfill, benefitting each and every member of our community. We know this is scratching the surface and we want to close that gap!

Feed the Hungry- Bread Break works with 41 recipient organizations. Our donations help stretch tight budgets and make a difference in people's lives far beyond addressing food insecurity, but that's secondary. Our primary goal is to feed people. For all of those organizations, Bread Break plays a critical role. But, for a select few Bread Break is the primary provider of food items for their kitchens. We provide over 6,000 pounds per month to St. Francis house and over 2,000 pounds per month to the VOA Veterans Assistance Center.  

By working with a variety of providers we are able to provide a variety of products. Proteins, carbohydrates, fresh vegetables, dairy, and more pass through Bread Break in every form imaginable. We work hard to make sure that those products are getting where they're needed and how they're needed. Our goal is to serve where needed, as needed!

Support the Community-  We measure our impact to the community in four ways. First, the reduction in food waste and the expense to our landfill and environment. Second, the ability to stretch budgets that we gift to organizations directly working with those in need. Third, by providing receipts and tracking donations we work to provide tax write-offs for our providers, many of whom are small businesses. And, finally, our work facilitates matching donations for at least three of our recipient organizations (ie: The national VoA provides matching funds for the value of the food we provide which helps cover one-third of the budget of the Veterans Assistance Center. And, St. Francis House received over $152,000 in matching funds from the food we provided last year. ). So, we know that our total pounds of food collected in 2019 was 248,000 pounds valued at $635,000.   Meaning that we're not only feeding the homeless, housing endangered, women and children seeking refuge from domestic violence, differently abled children, and food insecure vets, we're helping offset the costs of a Social Worker, an Events Coordinator, a Youth Counselor, a Cook, and more.  

We believe we are only scratching the surface of Bread Break's potential.   The need to hire a Full time staff person, develop volunteers, develop new providers and recipients is necessary to thrive and continue the food harvest.