Food Connection brings surplus chef-prepared food to the community.

Standing shoulder to shoulder in the spacious Mission Conference Center at AB-Tech, hundreds of attendees at AIR’s annual Taste of Asheville event balance beverages and plates of sweet and savory samples from over 50 AIR member restaurants, grazing from one station to the next. It’s hard to believe there will be a single biscuit, bonbon, bacon-wrapped date or beef skewer lingering on a serving platter.

But when the event ends at 8:30, there actually is food to spare. Thanks to Food Connection, not a bite will go to waste. At 8:31, staff and volunteers go to each table with recyclable aluminum containers, pack up the leftovers, date and label each, and take all of it to cold storage. The next day, in the kitchen of St. George’s Episcopal Church, all of it will be incorporated into the individual meals being assembled from other rescued food sources, and sent out into the community.

Flori Pate, founder of the nonprofit, is practically giddy about the partnership. “I love that we get to make these meals from the most delicious food created by Asheville’s best chefs who every year bring their A-game to Taste of Asheville, and then they go to our neighbors.”

The idea and motivation for Food Connection was set in motion during a meeting in late 2014 when Flori and her husband Ted – founder of Dig Local Asheville – were having lunch with client Pack’s Tavern. When Pack’s marketing director mentioned the leftover food going to waste after holiday parties held at the venue, Flori thought of the food insecure people in Asheville. She felt that there had to be a way to connect the two ends of the food chain –those with two much and those with not enough. She knew her church – Grace Covenant Presbyterian – had an outreach program that grew fresh produce in their community garden and distributed it to partner agencies who in turn distributed it to clients. Why not prepared food?

“At first, it was me and my minivan and a handful of volunteers,” Flori recalls. “We’d go to Pack’s, pick up disposable hotel pans of food and take those straight to agency partners like BeLoved Asheville, Salvation Army and Rescue Ministries.”

In January 2015, Food Connection was launched. Flori recruited other food partners that made large quantities of food for daily consumption or catered events, like UNC Asheville, Blue Ridge Assembly, Warren Wilson, The Asheville School, and Omni Grove Park Inn. As providers grew, Food Connection expanded into Black Mountain and Swannanoa and they upsized from Flori’s personal minivan to an official Ford transit van, branded with the Food Connection logo.

When Covid hit in March 2020, closing restaurants, locking down institutions and ending events, Food Connection’s source of food dried up, just as the numbers of food-insecure people in the community skyrocketed.

A generous anonymous donation set into motion a brilliant pivot – Food Connection contracted and paid for furloughed chefs to make individual meals, which Food Connection then took to open distribution locations for curb-side pickup. Ongoing fundraising kept that model going for some time, but as things began to open up, and their previous partners again had surplus pans of food to donate, Flori and her staff had to make a decision. “Do we go back to our original model of taking large quantities of food to partner agencies for them to distribute or do we continue with the individual meals that were working really well?”

The answer was yes. For the latter, they set up operations in the kitchen of St. George’s Episcopal Church and recruited more volunteers to assemble meals under the direction of professional cooks. In 2022, another anonymous donor allowed Food Connection to purchase and build out a food truck, which they named Fran. The colorfully wrapped truck with bold graphics rolls out five days a week to different locations, opens its window and hands out meals, no questions asked. Well, maybe one, says Flori with a laugh. “Do you want crab cakes from Grove Park Inn or pulled pork from 12 Bones?”

After Taste of Asheville, the question might be do you want meatballs from Twisted Laurel, cream of leek soup from Red Fiddle Vittles, pasta from Strada, pastries from Old Europe, deviled eggs from Tupelo Honey, or spiced fruit and brie tartine from Daphne’s Catering? The answer of course is yes.

Last year, the pans from Taste of Asheville resulted in more than 500 individual packaged meals distributed via Fran the Free Food Truck and other pickup points to the community.

In 11 years, Food Connection has grown from Flori and her minivan to 16 staff members and four vehicles, and kept more than 400 tons of chef-prepared food out of the Buncombe County landfills. They now have 100+ chef partners that donate food and 100+ agency partners that accept food; in 2025 they provided over 120,000 agency meals and 122,000 mobile meals.

This year is off to a great start. “We just delivered our one-millionth meal!” says Flori with delight. “Asheville is always – deservedly – making national lists of top ten places to visit if you’re a foodie. But that food is often completely unattainable for people who live and work here that  struggle with the rising costs of housing, food, medical bills and childcare. We aim to get our neighbors the kind of food people travel to Asheville for. Our mission is food with dignity.”

Taste of Asheville 2026 is Thursday March 26 at the AB-Tech Mission Conference Center; just a handful of tickets remain. Get yours before they’re gone.

More about Food Connection.

— Written by Kay West

Photos courtesy of Food Connection and AIR (credit Kara Dahlberg).