Scholars of Sustenance: Food for the needy in Thailand and Indonesia - optimization and adaptation

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Sep 24, 2020, 08:03 ET

CARY, N.C. and BALI, Indonesia, Sept. 24, 2020 /PRNewswire/ -- The world makes enough food for us all. While we are 7.8 billion people in the world, we produce enough food for 10 billion – yet one billion goes to bed hungry every night. After jobs were lost to the COVID crisis, it's become even worse. Hunger is spreading, yet this is mostly a distribution problem.

OPTIMIZATION: Scholars Of Sustenance (SOS), a North Carolina based food rescue charity, was created to capture edible food going to waste, inspect it and serve it quickly to those in need. "Good food needs to go into people's stomachs, not emit methane gasses from the landfill," states Turid Kaehny, co-founder of SOS International. Focusing on commercial entities such as hotels and retailers, SOS rescued tons of good nutrition every day for years. Lifting surplus food from one logistics system into another safe distribution system became SOS Food Rescue Optimization, redistributing huge amounts of nutrition for the needy in Thailand and Indonesia so far.

ADAPTATION: COVID threw everything into chaos and the hospitality industry lost jobs. For months a glut of excess food avoided being wasted by quick SOS action, and government institutions depended on SOS Cool-Chain supplying tons of food to needy recipients. SOS realized the urgent need for solid nutrition to help immune systems stay strong. Building SOS Rescue kitchens with an amazing effort by staff and volunteers cooking healthy meals for the needy, SOS has already served over a quarter million cooked meals during COVID. These cooked meals bring the SOS total volume to 7 million meals served since opening in 2016. SOS works with government and others to find the truly needy, a moving target during the crisis.

"I'm extremely proud of our hard working teams across Asia," added Bo H. Holmgreen, Founder of SOS. "Adapting to this new world, our staffs and trucks now impact more people than ever before, and we are not about to relax our works anytime soon." These efforts are not cheap, thus SOS has launched the "Feeding2020" campaign for donations. SOS aims to achieve "25 in 25" – a full 25 million nutritious meals in 2025. Mr. Holmgreen added: "Good nutrition is a basic right – we all need to help make it available."

FEEDING2020: please donate https://www.scholarsofsustenance.org/support-sos

www.scholarsofsustenance.org

www.facebook.com/scholarsofsustenancefoundation/

SOURCE Scholars of Sustenance