MrBeast teamed up with Philly’s Sharing Excess, expanding their wholesale food-rescue program to NYC

Sharing Excess, the homegrown food-rescue organization powered by college students and recent grads, has proved it’s both scrappy and savvy in its five-year existence. At the outset of the pandemic, it hustled to save literal tons of food in the wake of area shutdowns. It set up shop in the Philadelphia Wholesale Produce Market in 2021, creating an in-house food-rescue system that’s redirected 14 million pounds of often perfectly good produce from landfills to food banks and pantries instead. When the organization got a shipment of half a million surplus avocados from South America, they staged “Avogeddon” in FDR Park; Philadelphians lined up by the thousands during the highly publicized giveaway.

That track record has enabled the nonprofit to secure support from the likes of Philabundance, Share Food Program, and Pew Charitable Trusts. It also helped them land an even higher-profile partner: Beast Philanthropy, the nonprofit from YouTube multimillionaire Jimmy Donaldson a.k.a. MrBeast, best known for producing videos like “I Spent 7 Days Buried Alive” and “$1 vs. $1,000,000 Hotel Rooms.”

Earlier this month, Beast Philanthropy posted “We’re Giving Away $30 Million in Free Food,” a video featuring Sharing Excess and its 27-year-old founder, Evan Ehlers. It tells Sharing Excess’ story from its beginnings, with Ehlers giving away excess meal swipes at Drexel University, to its move into the Wholesale Produce Market, and it condenses over a year’s worth of collaboration between Beast Philanthropy and the Philly nonprofit. The video culminates in the partners opening a new food-rescue operation inside the Bronx’s Hunts Point Produce Market, one of the largest wholesale produce markets in the world.

The Hunts Point operation gives Sharing Excess and Beast Philanthropy an enormous opportunity to divert tens of millions of pounds of food from landfills and redistribute it to those in need. “When we first started Beast Philanthropy two and a half years ago,” Donaldson narrates, “our goal was to feed 400,000 meals in the first year. Now we’ll be doing just over 2 million meals a month and this is just the beginning.”

The 7½-minute video, viewed more than 10 million times since its mid-November debut, crams in a lot of facts and figures (for example, more than a third of the roughly 240 million tons of food produced in the U.S. every year goes to waste) as it weaves a compelling, efficient narrative. But there’s more to this ongoing partnership than the magic of video editing might let on, and it has big implications for the Philly nonprofit’s future.

Sharing Excess first approached Beast Philanthropy in February 2022, initially pitching them on breaking the record for the world’s largest food distribution. Ehlers had a Zoom call with Darren Margolias, a former real estate developer and the executive director of Beast Philanthropy. Margolias, who met Donaldson while MrBeast was filming its “I Adopted Every Dog in a Dog Shelter,” also helms Beast Pantry, a mobile food distribution network that operates out of Greenville, N.C.

“When we floated that idea, they were like, ‘OK, that sounds good. But what are you guys actually doing?’ And we explained to them the concept of food rescue,” Ehlers said. “How there’s so much surplus food out there and that you can partner with grocery stores and wholesalers and farmers to take their surplus food and feed people with it. And it’s a more sustainable model, both financially and environmentally, than maybe just buying the food as an outright food bank.”

Margolias got Ehlers on the phone shortly after they got off Zoom. “Can you get on an airplane and fly down to Greenville and meet us tomorrow?” he remembers asking Ehlers. “I’ve never done that before. And I’ve never done that since.”

Margolias was so impressed with Sharing Excess’ story and innovative model that he wanted to absorb them into Beast Philanthropy outright, but Ehlers demurred. Instead, the two nonprofits formed a quiet partnership.

Sharing Excess had been building out a nationwide network for its Direct Link program, which finds farms and growers with surplus food and remotely arranges transport to a nearby food bank or pantry. Beast Philanthropy covered the transportation costs for Direct Link in 19 states, including North Carolina, where surplus often goes to Beast Pantry. (That was a boon to the rurally focused food bank, which had seen dwindling supplies after government-funded pandemic-aid programs ended in 2021. Now, Sharing Excess ”can send us as much food as we need,” Margolias said.)

Meanwhile, Sharing Excess was exploring another partnership, this time with Hunts Point. The New York market’s CEO, Phillip Grant, had heard about their impact in Philadelphia. For good reason: “We’ve been able to cut [the Philadelphia Wholesale Produce Market’s] waste stream by more than 50%, so we saved them ... over half a million dollars a year,” Ehlers estimates. Sharing Excess’ work has also generated more than $1.5 million in state tax credits for the market and its vendors.

Grant invited Ehlers and his team to New York in December 2022, and the Hunts Point folks visited Sharing Excess in Philly to get an understanding of how a future collaboration might work.

Hunts Point moves about 900 million pounds of produce annually and spans over 1 million square feet, about twice the size of Philadelphia’s market. But while Philly’s state-of-the-art market is an airy, fully enclosed refrigerator (the world’s largest), Hunts Point’s jam-packed, circa-1960s infrastructure necessitates lots of box trucks and motorized pallet jacks. A Sharing Excess outfit there would have to operate in a smaller space and, in typical New York fashion, in a market with pricier, more competitive real estate.

It would be an expensive endeavor. So Ehlers approached Beast Philanthropy and asked if they would be interested in underwriting it. Thus far, neither Beast nor Sharing Excess had advertised their collaboration, but this opportunity prompted Jimmy Donaldson to make a video, the sponsorship for which would go entirely to Sharing Excess.

Thanks to cash-back shopping app Ibotta and Robin Hood, New York City’s largest poverty-fighting nonprofit, Beast Philanthropy was able to give Sharing Excess a combined $550,000 that funded most, and perhaps all, of its costs in setting up in Hunts Point. Ehlers said the organization budgeted $700,000 in start-up costs for Hunts Point.

The nonprofit did save a ton when longtime vendor S. Katzman Produce donated a 53-foot refrigerated tractor trailer for storage and warehouse space for sorting. (Sharing Excess’ breezeway and office space in Philadelphia’s wholesale market is donated by the market itself.)

That arrangement encourages Ehlers when it comes to Sharing Excess launching operations elsewhere: “There’s obviously a lot more individual vendors that may be down for this operation than a very sort of bureaucratic board that has to make one singular decision,” he said. “This is a model that we would love to be able to take to every produce market in the United States. That’s our goal.”

Since launching at Hunts Point in September, Sharing Excess has rescued more than 1 million pounds of food working with just a third of its vendors. Ehlers projects the total volume of donations in its first year could be between 5 and 8 million pounds, and triple what they handle in Philly’s market once they’re fully established.

Margolias points to a less quantifiable but potentially greater impact the Beast Philanthropy/Sharing Excess collaboration may have: inspiring others.

“If enough people are inspired by Evan’s story and enough people start talking, saying, ‘Yeah, I want to be part of this,’ we can actually do something that moves the needle,” Margolias said. He added that Ehlers had heard from people around the world who had watched the Beast Philanthropy video. (Ehlers confirmed he had gotten messages from aspiring food rescuers in nine countries, including the U.K., Argentina, Germany, Mexico, and India.)

“I think that most people are really caring people, but they haven’t discovered that for themselves,” Margolias said. “When you can inspire them and they go and do something, they learn that giving is not just giving — you get a reward when you give.

“Small little acts of kindness become huge when when they’re repeated,” he said.