Share My Meals has given us a sustainable, technology-driven, local, and cost-effective platform to simplify food recovery. It’s incredibly rewarding for my team to use our resources to help address food insecurity in our community.”
The Share My Meals (SMM) story began in 2019, when co-founder Isabelle Lambotte volunteered at a local food pantry in Princeton and saw the need to provide prepared nutritious meals to families facing food insecurity.
Initially operating with a small group of volunteers, Share My Meals began its operations during COVID, utilizing New Jersey’s Sustain and Serve Program, purchasing meals at cost from restaurants and delivering them directly to local families.
What began as a grassroots effort quickly evolved into a scalable, tech-powered nonprofit. In 2021, SMM launched a formal Meal Recovery Program (MRP) and developped partnerships with corporate cafeterias, schools, universities, and hospitals to recover their surplus meals. As we grew, so did our commitment to food safety, operational efficiency, and community impact. We created STAN, our Salesforce-powered (for Safety, Tracking, Allocation, and Navigation) system, a technology platform which tracks every meal in real time from donor to recipient.
We aspire to a world where everyone has access to healthy food and no food goes to waste.
Share My Meals fights both food insecurity and the environmental impact of food waste by recovering and delivering healthy meals in local communities.
SMM has recovered and distributed over 350,000 prepared meals across New Jersey, diverting thousands of pounds of food from landfills and preventing harmful CO₂ emissions.
Knowing that many more surplus meals are available for recovery, SMM launched the Meal Recovery Coalition in 2024 with the ambition to scale meal recovery through partnership. SMM is the lead agency behind the Coalition which now counts 12 members and many partner organizations.
Share My Meals has given us a sustainable, technology-driven, local, and cost-effective platform to simplify food recovery. It’s incredibly rewarding for my team to use our resources to help address food insecurity in our community.”
We are so incredibly grateful for the support, and it’s going better than expected. Because we are receiving some types of food we haven’t received in the past, the folks we serve in Newark have been so excited and thrilled to have such a great variety of meals. In such a short time, our team has noticed a shift in joy and an uplifting of spirits when we are serving. We are just loving all the donated food, and more importantly, the folks we serve are absolutely loving it. It’s been super fun to make up meals from the trays we receive and how creative we can be with them.”
I have been involved with Share My Meals since its inception and have watched the steady growth and life changing abilities of a few focused individuals as they have transformed this organization. The ability to provide healthy, fresh and nourishing meals for folks in need while simultaneously having a direct effect on waste reduction is truly miraculous.”
