Nearly 48 million Americans lived in food-insecure households in 2024, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture, and close to a third of the food produced in the United States goes to waste. Last year alone, roughly 15,000 American farms went out of business. Farmlink exists in the gap between those numbers. It started in April 2020, when college junior Aidan Reilly and his co-founder James Kanoff were sent home at the start of the pandemic and learned their local food bank had gone from serving 300 families a week to 1,000, almost overnight. Around the same time, they read about farmers dumping millions of gallons of milk and burying truckloads of potatoes because the contracts that normally moved their produce to schools, stadiums, and restaurants had disappeared. With no experience in farming or logistics, they started cold-calling farmers, rented a U-Haul, and made their first delivery: 60,000 eggs to a food bank. Ten days later they had 200 volunteers. Three weeks later they had moved a million pounds of food. Six years on, Farmlink is a fully remote, asset-light organization that, according to its founders, works with a network of more than 1,000 charity partners across every state. In this conversation, Aidan and CEO Eliza Blank explain what it actually takes to move perishable food fast, at scale, with no warehouses and no trucks of their own, and why they consider themselves the last call a farmer makes, not the first. As Eliza puts it, Farmlink exists to make sure "logistics is not the reason, and cost of transportation never is the reason why people aren't getting fed." In this episode, you'll learn: Why two 21-year-olds with zero farming experience became the people U.S. farmers call when they have nowhere left to turn How Farmlink moves perishable surplus into the hands of families in need within 24 to 72 hours, with no warehouses or trucks of its own Why the organization covers both coordination and freight costs, and how that decision unlocked supply that would otherwise rot in the field What is actually driving the wave of American farm closures, and why Farmlink wants to help farmers get paid, not just donate for free How a growing database of charity partners is helping Farmlink understand real-time capacity across a national network Why human relationships and trust, built over six years, remain the one thing technology cannot replace, even as data plays a bigger role What it would take to responsibly adapt the Farmlink model beyond the United States, and why the founders insist local ownership has to come first About the guests Aidan Reilly is co-founder of Farmlink, which he started in 2020 as a college student to connect farm surplus with communities facing food insecurity across the United States. Eliza Blank is Chief Executive Officer of Farmlink, leading the organization's work coordinating logistics, cost, and a nationwide network of charity partners to reduce food waste and hunger. Visit our Knowledge Hub at Lidji.org for information on 350+ case studies and interviews with remarkable leaders in philanthropy, sustainability and social entrepreneurship.
