Advancing food justice by cultivating a community of neighbors helping neighbors.
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Our Philosophy
Food is not just fuel. Food is memories. Food is people. Community. Comfort. Celebration.
Food is joy. And it’s up to us to pass it on. Here’s why.
Only one in four New Yorkers who experience a food emergency access a food pantry, citing both physical barriers – such as transportation and inconvenience – and emotional ones, including stigma, discrimination, or even just dignity.
Grassroots Grocery removes those barriers by bringing the pantry to the people. As a bottom-up movement, we partner with trusted community leaders who distribute food to their neighbors. Whether it’s a Saturday spent delivering produce or bringing your favorite chili to a community fridge, every action helps feed people in need – without sacrificing their pride.
People exist to help one another. When you’re short a cup of sugar, you call a neighbor. And when you can, you return the favor. That give-and-take relationship is the thread that binds our neighbors together, creating a community committed to feeding each other.
Our Impact
31+
Community-led hyper-local food distribution sites
1400+
Avg. families reached each Saturday
850,000+
Pounds of fresh produce rescued
6000+
Volunteers recruited
$900,000+
Total fundraised
Programs
Rapid Rescue - the “Produce Party”!
Nestled at the mouth of the Bronx River is the Hunts Point Produce Market, one of the world’s largest produce distribution centers. This market is overflowing with wholesale bulk food. Just a few miles away, there are families without enough to eat.
Our job? Get the food to those families.
Every Saturday, we rescue over 10,000 pounds of produce from our amazing Hunts Point Produce Market partners and distribute it to more than 1,100 families. Each drop-off site has a community leader, or grassroots grocer, who is committed to getting this food to people in their neighborhood. Our volunteer drivers help deliver this harvest to places it’s never gone before: hanging on a doorknob for someone who can’t leave their home, or in a community fridge where anyone can access it without having to ask.
Our impact is made possible by people who just want to help their neighbors thrive. And they know that the best change happens on your own block – because when you put all the blocks together, you have a movement.
Community Fridges
Imagine a place where anyone can take what they need. Sounds utopian, right? Well, it exists – and it’s right here in our community fridges. Neighbors in need fill their plates and pantries with food donated by fellow neighbors – no questions asked.
How do we fill our fridges? Well, think if you grabbed an extra loaf of bread on your trip to the market. Your neighbor across the street picks a few more apples from the bunch. And the tenant upstairs makes eight servings of soup instead of four. Together, that community fridge is starting to look like the one in your own home.
When everyone pitches in, these seemingly small acts of kindness can feed entire communities. Our vision is for each fridge to be a seed that grows on its own. We just till the soil.
Our Story
Dan Zauderer, our founder, was a middle school teacher in the South Bronx when he saw a student with his grandmother digging through the trash one day. Dan soon learned that one in four of his students' families were skipping meals or eating too little several times per week, despite living just miles from the largest produce market in the United States. It became Dan's mission to make sure his students and their families would never go without the food they need. He teamed up with his school community to open the first community refrigerator in Mott Haven. What started as one sidewalk fridge soon became two, then three, with the addition of the Co-Op City Community Fridge. Not long after, Dan left his job as a middle school teacher to devote his life to serving communities just like the ones his students were from. And the rest is history.
