Cultivate Food Rescue Could End Hunger In Michiana — For Good

With its new cold storage facility, the organization is closer than ever to rescuing enough food for everyone who needs it

When Cultivate Food Rescue cut the ribbon on their new cold storage facility in June 2024, it was a celebratory moment, but it was hardly a culmination. More than anything else, it was just another beginning, another step in a long process that Jim Conklin hopes will bring an end to hunger in our community.

Conklin is the Executive Director at Cultivate, and he’s positively evangelistic about the mission of his organization. He is quick to point out that hunger is a solvable problem, that we waste three times as much food in America as we need to feed everyone. That means that hunger is the result of a production problem.

It’s a logistics problem, one that Cultivate hopes to solve. With the cold storage facility operational, Conklin points out that the organization is that much closer to making the solution a reality.

“We could handle two million pounds of food in the old building,” he says. “In the new one, we have the capacity for twenty million.”

The best part?

Conklin believes that, in the next five years, they’ll reach that capacity. And when that happens, that means that Cultivate will rescue enough food to feed every hungry person in a broad geographic region that includes St. Joseph, Marshall, and Elkhart Counties.

“The goal since the beginning has been to bring enough food into the community to end hunger,” Conklin states confidently, as if the whole thing had always been an inevitability and never a pipe dream.

Amazingly, Cultivate’s goals are even bigger than ending hunger locally. Food rescue does a lot more than put dinner on the table — it also addresses crucial environmental problems facing the nation and the world. Conklin points out that if food waste were its own country, it would rank third globally in emissions.

Cultivate’s cold storage facility, funded in part by a $250,000 Special Project grant, began paying dividends almost immediately once the doors were opened. Less than a month after the ribbon cutting, Cultivate received a phone call from a company wanting to donate 200,000 pounds of frozen food — 23 trucks worth. Had the call come a few months earlier, the organization would have never been able to handle it.

“It’s gut-wrenching to have to turn down food,” Conklin says.

It’s a feeling he’s become less familiar with since the opening of the new facility, and the expansion couldn’t have come at a better time. In 2025, as food prices rise and government assistance declines, hunger is on the rise right here in St. Joseph County. According to Conklin, one child in seven is food insecure during the best of times. During the worst of times, it’s one in four.

Thanks to the new facility, passionate leadership, dedicated volunteers, and generous funders; Cultivate is ready to tackle even the worst of times. It puts food directly into kids’ backpacks, fills pantries, and provides partners across Michiana with food where it is needed the most.

There aren’t many people in the country who can tell you — with a straight face — that they’re on a path toward ending hunger. But Jim Conklin is one of those people and Cultivate is one of those places. Ending hunger isn’t a dream anymore. It’s a plan, and it might be closer than anyone thinks.

Published: July 22, 2025
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