Lehigh Valley nonprofit rescues thousands of pounds of food

Jeffrey and Jennifer McCary, a husband and wife from Schnecksville, have made it their mission to ensure no food or valuable items go to waste in the Lehigh Valley.

Their nonprofit iHave iNeed, established in 2023, rescues excess food and items from bakeries, restaurants, shuttered businesses and more, and ensures that everything ends up with someone who needs it.

The McCarys have volunteered at their local food pantry for over a decade, and have seen the need for resources grow, which is why they began their food rescue initiative. Their philosophy is this: There is enough to go around, but it takes coordination and manpower to make it happen and ensure people are fed and have their needs met.

Food has been their focus lately — Lehigh Valley food pantries are seeing increased need amid grocery inflation and uncertainty over SNAP benefits. But the McCarys turn nothing down that would otherwise go to waste.

“If someone says, ‘We have this and we can’t use it,’ we take that as a challenge,” Jennifer said. “We are not going to throw it out, we can always find someone who can use it.”

The nonprofit’s success has come from partnerships with businesses and other organizations across the Lehigh Valley. They have rescued around 64,000 pounds of food this year to date, averaging over 1,000 pounds a week.

The duo, operating out of a personal vehicle and a borrowed SUV from Jennifer’s mother, spent a recent Friday morning crisscrossing Lehigh County, picking up unwanted and unneeded items, and giving them to nonprofit organizations helping people in need.

Beginning by picking up excess food at the Northern Lehigh and Parkland Cares food pantries, the McCarys brought hundreds of pounds combined to Operation Address the Homeless, Casa Guadalupe Center, Allentown Rescue Mission and Catasauqua Food Pantry.

Sometimes the donating goes both ways — the McCarys dropped off 85 pounds of baked goods, 25 pounds of produce and over 100 pounds of juice and fruit cups to Operation Address the Homeless that morning, which in turn gave them boxes of donated goods.

OATH receives regular donations from Walmart, not all of which they can use; for example, items like broth or cream of wheat that require a kitchen are not as practical for people who do not have a roof over their heads. The McCarys rehome those donations to food pantries around the Lehigh Valley.

The partnership with iHave iNeed has been a boon for Operation Address the Homeless, which has seen an increased need from its clients due to an increasing homeless population and the fact that many have been displaced from an encampment along the Jordan Creek, according to facility manager Christina Smith.

OATH serves a hot dinner three nights a week and gets up to 70 people lining up for a meal regularly.

“We have more people now that they are closing down the encampment,” Smith said. “They are being pushed in this direction when they were comfortable over there. They had their own little burners, and stuff like that. So now, they don’t know where they are going to get their meals.”

The McCarys’ next Friday morning stop was Casa Guadalupe Center in Allentown’s first ward neighborhood, where senior center manager Gigi Espada oversaw a senior lunch drawing dozens to its community room for a meal of soup and bread.

iHave iNeed dropped off 125 pounds of baked goods and 25 pounds of produce, which Casa Guadalupe will use for future lunches — it hosts senior lunches every Wednesday, and Espada said the organization would like to begin hosting a “Wednesday cafe” too, specifically providing meals for homeless people in Allentown.

“It has been such a great blessing,” Espada said of the partnership.

Though food was their primary focus during Friday’s drop-offs and deliveries, the McCarys have gotten creative with rehoming other items too, some of which were unconventional. They came upon an excess of 100 pregnancy tests last month, which Casa Guadalupe was happy to take for its women and children program.

iHave iNeed also swept in when the UNFI warehouse in North Whitehall Township closed in October, leaving thousands of supplies like coffee, coffee creamer, cleaning supplies, industrial coveralls and steel-toed work boots destined for landfills. The boots and coveralls found a home at Operation Address the Homeless, which can distribute the work uniforms to homeless people who are looking for or have employment at a warehouse.

The coffee items ended up at food pantries, and the McCarys dropped off cleaning supplies at the Allentown Rescue Mission on Friday morning.

iHave iNeed is volunteer-driven; the McCarys use an app called Food Rescue USA to send out calls to volunteers who sign up to pick up and drop off donated items.

But they hope to expand their operations to save even more food and items from landfills in the Lehigh Valley.

The nonprofit is fundraising for a large van to accommodate larger drop-offs and deliveries, and is also seeking to rent warehouse space for storage of donated items — currently, the McCarys store items they are looking to rehome in their garage or living room.

Further into the future, iHave iNeed would like to expand enough to hire full-time staff, and even scale its operations into a model that could be replicated outside the Lehigh Valley.

“We’re all volunteers at this point,” Jeffrey said. “That is something else that is a goal, we need to start getting funds so that we can pay people to actually do some of the work. … Because honestly, at this point, if Jen and I stopped doing what we’re doing, I mean, it’s going to fade, it will fade.

“I mean, it is fulfilling. It’s amazing, but you have to pay the bills,” he added. “And we have to set up the structure so that it’s self-sustaining.”