In Her Words: Tamara Weber Feeds Families in Need & Prevents Food Waste
An innovative approach to fighting hunger in Kansas City
I got to a point in my life where I felt like I wasn’t making much of a difference. I felt limited in my ability to have an impact professionally in my job at Hallmark Cards. Perhaps that made me more open to opportunities where I could impact my community in some positive and meaningful way.
In February 2019, my daughter, who was in eighth grade at the time, was attending a meeting of her school's social justice club. I happened to attend with her and we watched a documentary Anthony Bourdain produced and narrated about food waste. It was really impactful for me. The documentary featured mostly produce, which is typically the most expensive product in supermarkets. My daughter and I looked for an organization in Kansas City where we could volunteer to help address this issue, but there wasn’t much happening here around food waste at the time.
Two Sides of the Same Coin: Food Waste and Food Need
My work experience was mostly in new business development. I would look at market opportunities, identify the business model, and help figure out how we were going to differentiate ourselves as a company. It was easy for me to apply that kind of process to food recovery. To understand what was going on, I asked, “Who in Kansas City deals with food?” and started interviewing managers at several local food pantries and our regional food bank.
I also learned that restaurants and caterers often had surplus prepared food, but didn’t have a place to take it. A food pantry typically can’t just take a large restaurant tray of lasagna and turn around and hand that to one of their clients. Community kitchens can’t take large trays of food like that either. They have to be able to plan their meals in advance in order to operate effectively.
No one wants to throw out good food. But if they don’t have any place to take it, that’s what happens. They pitch it.
The more I learned, the clearer it became to me that access to prepared food was a missing piece for working parents and especially for single mothers. You can go to a food pantry and get a bag of groceries, but then you still have to prepare the food when you get home from work. As a working mother with two young kids and a husband who traveled a lot for work, I was home with my kids by myself during the week and when I would come home at 5:30 or 6:00 pm and try to get dinner together, it was a real struggle. For me, the struggle was about time and energy. If I were really tired, I could order Chinese food or something. For a single mom who’s working in a low wage job, time is an issue, but money is the bigger issue. If she gets takeout, it’s going to be hard on her budget and the food quality she can afford might not be that great.
On the one hand, there was restaurant prepared food that no one knew what to do with, and on the other hand, there were a lot of single moms working low wage jobs who would love to be able to take home nice restaurant quality meals, maybe not every night, but maybe once a week, to make things a little bit easier at home. I saw an opportunity to use one problem to solve the other.
Everyone said, “That's a great idea.” But every nonprofit has their mission and focus. They have funds to do what they’re doing. No one was picking this idea up, which forced me to think it through myself. I put a pitch together, and I went to the Head Start programs. There’s one program in particular that serves about 500 to 700 families and is well regarded. They’ve been around for 50 years. In the summer of 2019, I went to talk to their CEO. “Well, this is great. When can you start doing this?” she said after about 10 minutes into the conversation. “We have a brand new commercial kitchen that we’re planning to start using, but right now it’s underutilized. That’s where you could work.”
I’m not an impulsive risk taker, but I was at a point where I would get home from work and the first thing I’d want to do was pour myself a glass of wine so that I could forget having a bad day. That’s not the model I wanted for my kids and especially not for my daughter. Then I went to lunch with a very close friend of mine, who had had breast cancer five years earlier and we all thought she was clear. At lunch she told me that her cancer had come back, and it was everywhere. That’s what pushed me over the edge. Life is too short to be miserable. That was the bigger risk. I quit my job at the end of May 2019.
I told the CEO of the Head Start program that I could start at the end of October. I had about two and a half months to get a couple of food donors lined up. I already had been talking to some caterers and food service organizations, so I knew that there were a couple of places that were willing to pilot with me.
I got my Serve Safe food safety certification and planned to pick up food in my car. At this point, I was paying for supplies out of my own pocket. I bought a couple of cases of those take home plastic containers that you get from restaurants — the black ones with the clear lids. I started a spreadsheet to keep track of the food coming in and to assign lot numbers. I made some labels on my printer to show what the food was, the lot number, the expiration date and a standard allergy disclaimer. I tracked how much food I was expecting from each donor, and how much I got. I tracked how many minutes it would take me to pack in each container. If was getting 1000 pounds, I knew how many minutes that would that take, and how many people I would need to process the meals.
My first food donation pickup was the week before Thanksgiving, which was nice timing. One donor was a caterer who had a lot of smoked meats and barbecue and they would donate 50 or 60 pounds at a time after events. Another donor was the American Century Investments corporate dining room. They would make food for hundreds of people in their corporate headquarters, and there were always leftovers, because they didn’t know what people were going to eat or how many people would be on site on any given day.
Making the Fast Break
By the end of 2019, it was clear that the program worked. I started the process to complete our application for 501c3 status for Pete’s Garden, which was pretty time consuming. We got our 501c3 in the same week of March of 2020 that Kansas City went into lockdown. It was right before spring break, and Kansas City was hosting the NCAA basketball tournament. All that March Madness basketball stuff got canceled. The caterer called and said, “We have all this food we’ve prepared. Can you take it?” That was a major food donation and the last one like it that I received for two years. All the places that were going to be donating food shut down. I was getting desperate.
I started hearing about restaurants that didn’t want to let go of their staff, and they had all this food in their refrigerators. There were efforts all around the country where restaurants and their staff were making meals for the community. They’d make meals and donate it. Kansas City had its own version of that happening. Someone needed to figure out where these meals were going. I became the intermediary; I would get meals and repackage them into the take home containers I had for the Head Start families. At that point, it wasn’t food recovery, it was food distribution.
The media picked up the story, Pete’s Garden was mentioned, and we started to get connected to other organizations like Operation Barbecue Relief, which goes to disaster zones and makes food for first responders and communities that are hit by hurricanes or tornadoes. With Covid, the restaurant industry was the disaster. The restaurants were taking all their ingredients to the local barbecue place, which would make meals and then donate them back out to the community. I was the distribution hub, and through that effort we distributed 10,000 meals over the course of three or four months.
Then I came up with the idea to get sponsors to give me money. I’d use the money to buy the ingredients and pay restaurants a stipend to make the meals for me. I received money from our regional Covid Relief Fund to pay stipends to restaurants to make the meals, which I then distributed to the families. I was doing whatever I could to help families, but also to help restaurants survive during that time.
Kids Feeding Kids
I started thinking, “Who else can make food for me?” One of my board members suggested going to our local high school, which has a very well regarded culinary arts program for high school students. It’s a pre-professional program with a full commercial kitchen. These kids compete in national competitions. I thought “If I buy all the ingredients, maybe these students will make food for us.” I went to the school and pitched the idea, and they said “That sounds good. We'll try it.” They wanted their kids to have the experience of cooking in bulk, but they didn’t have any catered events to cook for because everything was shut down. I named the program Kids Feeding Kids.
During this time, I also got connected to 15 and Mahomies Foundation, which was established in 2019 by Patrick Mahomes, NFL MVP, Kansas City Chiefs quarterback. He likes to support organizations that work with kids and get kids involved in community service. I got connected to the gentleman who was directing his foundation, pitched him the idea for Kids Feeding Kids, and a couple months later, I got a check in the mail for $15,000.
In 2022, food recovery was starting to come back online, and the Kids Feeding Kids program was continuing to grow too. I wanted the Kids Feeding Kids program to become something more than just, “Here's a bunch of ingredients. Go cook something.” I wanted it to become a curriculum that was hands on teaching the kids about food waste and food insecurity.
Diane Mora, a trained chef, and an educator who was named Teacher of the Year in 2019 in Kansas City, Missouri, was one of my volunteers. I started telling her about Kids Feeding Kids, and I could see she was really interested in the program. I told her I couldn’t guarantee a salary or a position, but I’d pay her as a consultant to develop a curriculum with lesson plans and recipes so we would have the structure to know what we were going to be serving and how much it would cost. Diane came on board as our education director and now that program has taken on a life of its own.
This year we’re in 38 schools across Kansas and Missouri, Diane has adapted the program for family and consumer science classes, which used to be called home economics. These classrooms can prepare 250 to 300 servings of food to be donated. In culinary arts classrooms, they can prepare 500 to 1000 servings, because they're operating at a professional level. Pretty much every public high school has a family and consumer science class, and now we have a curriculum that’s a real world learning program. Last summer we had our inaugural Summer Educator Institute to provide pre-professional training for teachers so they can experience the curriculum and prepare a meal like they would in their classrooms.
How are the food recovery efforts going today?
This year, Pete’s Garden will recover over 150,000 pounds of food, which is the equivalent of about 125,000 meals. I estimate about 600 families get to take home a family dinner at least once a week, because of all the food that we recover.
If you were to go back in time, what would you tell your 25 year old self?
Find a job that makes you happy. If every morning you're getting up and going to work and you’re not excited about what you’re going to do, you can do that for a couple of weeks, maybe a year. If you’re doing that for your whole career, that’s not a good thing. I’m happy about my corporate career and business skills that I learned. When they look at my LinkedIn resume, funders can see that I know what I’m doing in running Pete’s Garden. They are businesspeople. Everything that I did before set me up to be successful now. I appreciate everything that I’ve done before, but I think my advice to myself would be that work needs to be more than just a paycheck.
Bell Curve Stories is about women navigating life with grit, grace, and growth. What do those three words mean to you?
Grit is doing what needs to get done. During Covid, I was driving my car, picking up food, packing the food, and getting it done. Grace is not beating yourself up if something doesn’t work out exactly right. If I plan to get 200 meals out, and I only get 150 out, grace is recognizing that I’m doing the best I can, and that is good enough.
Growth for me is doing all these things that I never felt comfortable doing before, like talking in front of large groups of people and asking people for money. It’s hard. Making a presentation would always cause a lot of anxiety for me. It is easier for me to make a presentation now because I’ve gotten comfortable being uncomfortable.
I know what “growing pains” means now. When we are really struggling, that’s because we’re growing. We have to give ourselves some grace to recognize that.
As told to and edited by Teresa Bellock and Sandra Ditore.
Tamara Weber, 56, founder of Pete’s Garden, is a former Hallmark executive, with an MBA from Northwestern’s Kellogg School of Management. She lives and works in the Kansas City, Missouri area with her husband and children. To support Tamara’s efforts, please consider donating to Pete’s Garden.
Tamara, you are amazing and inspiring to all of us who are looking to help and make a difference in someone's life.