Boston Area Gleaners Inc.

We build innovative partnerships with local farms, hunger relief organizations, and social justice-focused food businesses to alleviate food insecurity, promote farm sustainability, and reduce food waste.

BAG addresses systemic food waste and hunger through our main programmatic activities - Gleaning, Distribution, Education and Outreach, and Boston Food Hub. Gleaning: Through our gleaning program, we organize groups of volunteers to harvest surplus fruits and vegetables from local farms. Each season, we capture hundreds of thousands of pounds of produce that would otherwise go to waste and redirect it into the hunger relief sector.
Distribution: Boston Area Gleaners is a major distributor of food between farmers, food recovery organizations, and hunger relief agencies—and aims to continually increase the efficiency of the supply chain for all.
Boston Food Hub: The Boston Food Hub provides reliable economic incentives for farmers to move their crops to markets that value food equity, nutrition, and local foods. Through this service, BAG aggregates crops from local farms and connects them to local buyers. In the process, we expand the reach of local food, support the financial sustainability of small farmers, and divert more crops from the waste stream.
Education and Outreach: BAG is committed to educating the public about food insecurity and the importance of building a more equitable food system. In 2018, BAG launched the Gleaning Apprenticeship Program, designed
to give a comprehensive overview of the regional food system in New England and provide firsthand experience in innovative food distribution practices.

Although we are a relatively small organization, BAG’s impact is felt on a large scale through our work with some of the biggest farms and food distributors in the region, and through our partnerships with local organizations that are supporting economic development models that resource and empower food-insecure individuals. BAG’s services are not only unique, but also critical in preventing needless large-scale food waste in our region.

BAG was founded as a grassroots organization in 2004 by Oakes Plimpton, an agriculture and hunger advocate who noticed the discrepancy between the amount of food going to waste in farm fields and the number of people facing hunger. He and a few passionate volunteers decided to take action by creating an organization that captured surplus crops from local farms and delivered them to food pantries. Non-profit status was approved in 2007, and to this day, BAG remains the region's only farm-focused gleaning organization.

Since its inception, BAG has captured more than 4 million pounds of surplus produce, the equivalent of 16 million servings of fresh fruits and vegetables, through partnerships with more than 80 local farms, 550 hunger-relief agencies, and 2,500 volunteers. Additionally, we have increased our annual operational capacity from 8,240 pounds and 10 crop varieties during our first gleaning season to 1.1 million pounds and more than 60 crop varieties in 2019, the equivalent of 4.4 million servings of fresh fruits and vegetables.