Starbucks donating unsold food to Seattle shelters, food banks

Starbucks said Thursday it will donate unsold food to Seattle-area shelters and food banks.

Every night, unsold food will be picked up from stores around Seattle and distributed to local food banks.

The program started last year and was implemented in 15 markets around the country; the FoodShare program was fully in place Sept. 7 for the Seattle area.

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Food will be provided to food banks in White Center, homeless shelter Mary's Place and other social service organizations around the city, the release says.

"We know that poverty and hunger are strongly linked," Angela Beard, executive director of the White Center Food Bank, said. Beard says 22 percent of residents in White Center live below the federal poverty line.

In the first year of Starbucks’ FoodShare program, an estimated three million meals were given to food banks.

“A parent can put a Starbucks sandwich in their child’s lunch and know the child will feel proud to unpack that lunch,” Laura Olson, senior manager of Global Social Impact at Starbucks, said. “We’ve heard about responses from guests of the food banks about being able to provide something special for their child -- even though they are facing challenges."

In early August, a new Starbucks opened in White Center: the first for the neighborhood. The White Center location is one of seven 'community stores' in the country that offer programs like in-store job skills training for youth -- and prioritizing work with local women and minority-owned contractors and vendors.

The company says their community stores focus on long-term investment in underserved communities.

"Unincorporated and little regulated, White Center was perceived as untamed and independent," Ron Richardson wrote in a HistoryLink essay on the area.

"In the words of White Center poet Richard Hugo (1923-1982), "White Center had the reputation of being just outside the boundary of the civilized world." … From the 1970s on, the federal housing projects, built for wartime workers, evolved into homes for low-income families and eventually immigrant families, resulting in one of the most diverse communities in the Northwest."

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