If you think young Americans are lazy, spend five minutes talking with Maria Rose Belding. 
 
 The 20-year-old American University sophomore is the co-founder of MEANS Database, which connects people, organizations, and businesses with extra food with food banks and pantries that need it. In its first year, the food recovery notification system rescued about 4,000 pounds of food; became the first non-profit to win the GW New Venture Competition; and just took home a $10,000 prize from L’Oreal Paris through its Women Of Worth campaign. (At the L’Oreal Paris celebration event last week, Belding was the youngest of the 10 honorees.) It’s also figuring out how to make enough money to become self sufficient, a rarity for non-profits. 
 
 meansdatabase.com 
 
 MEANS operates through both a website and an app, creating a simple system: A donor lists what’s available, donees nearby get notifications, someone claims it and arranges for pick-up. As a high school freshman, Belding was volunteering at a local soup pantry in her hometown in Iowa, when she watched the director scramble to find recipients for the 10,000 boxes of macaroni and cheese a church had donated. Not everything found a home before the expiration date, and a lot ended up in the trash. 
 
 In the world of food waste, this is the oft-cited paradox: There are 48 million Americans living in food insecurity, meaning that, at times during the year, these households were uncertain of having, or unable to acquire, enough food because they didn’t have sufficient money or other resources. Yet Americans waste an estimated 40% of the country’s food. It’s not a problem of supply or demand. It’s connecting the two. 
 
 Hunger is a problem hitting more people than most realize, including college students. “We have several campus food pantries on MEANS,” Belding tells Quartz. “We will be able to funnel food to the same kids we sit in class with.” 
 
 Belding’s idea didn’t become a reality, though, until she met her co-founder, Grant Nelson. He developed the technology while she found the donors, food banks, and pantries that would use the database. 
 
 The technology and wide reach—it currently has over 200 donor and recipient accounts representing more than 2,000 partner agencies and programs, spread out over 27 states—are largely what makes MEANS different from other food rescue organizations. City Harvest, for example, provides a similar service in New York, rescuing a whopping 50 million pounds of food just this year. But it works at a larger scale and arranges the legwork itself, like matching and transporting donations with food kitchens that need them. The MEANS platform allows small organizations and individuals to participate on a scale that might be too small for an organization like City Harvest, but crucial to the people they help. Belding says nearly every donation finds a new home—the only one she could remember that didn’t was 23 individually wrapped cupcakes with a very short window of recovery time. 
 
 Getty Images for L'Oreal Paris Belding strikes a pose at the L’Oreal Paris Women of Worth 2015 Celebration in New York. 
 
 Thanks in part to wins like the one from GW ($42,500 in cash and $20,000 in prizes) and L’Oreal, MEANS now has a staff of 11 people, as well as 10 interns and volunteers. But, says Belding, “I’m not content to be chasing other people’s money.” So she and her team are working on a system to help them become less grant dependent. 
 
 While large retail donors don’t currently claim tax credits for their donation—they’re too small and localized to be worth the trouble—MEANS already tracks all the information they would need. ”For us, it’s a matter of keystrokes,” says Belding. 
 
 Companies can use it to get tax benefits, while MEANS—which is free for users—takes a small fee. ”We haven’t started executing it yet, but every conversation with retailers we’ve had has been, ‘You can build that?'” 
 
 Next year, Belding hopes to launch that program, grow and improve the one already in place, and create a public, searchable directory of food pantries. (She’s found that half the pantries she and her team have called list wrong numbers.) 
 
 This week, though, Belding is focused on finals. On top of the full-time hours she puts into MEANS—she didn’t want to say how many because her parents will read the story—she is still a student. And a very impressive one. Her report card this semester, she says, should be all As and A-minuses. “There might be a B-plus, but I’m hoping not.” ||||| Maria Rose Belding and Grant Nelson founded a sprawling online network that connects thousands of food pantries in 24 states, allowing those organizations to quickly share surplus food that might have gone to waste otherwise. (Ricky Carioti/The Washington Post) 
 
 One of the most profound contradictions of modern America is that more than 45 million Americans don’t have enough to eat, but the country wastes an estimated 40 percent of its food. The forces fueling this paradox are complex: Grocery stores think they’ll assume legal liability in donating food. Farmers allow edible, but homely fruit to rot in fear it won’t sell. Bananas blacken on all our shelves. 
 
 But the reasons behind this waste didn’t feel so complex to a teenage girl named Maria Rose Belding on a chilly Iowa day five years ago. 
 
 The whole thing felt simple. It felt wrong. It felt like something had to change. 
 
 Belding, then a volunteer at a local food pantry in Pella, had just thrown out hundreds of boxes of expired mac and cheese in front of numerous people lining up outside to collect food. 
 
 “We were throwing away all of this food just because we couldn’t communicate,” Belding, then a freshman in high school, remembers venting that day. That frustration would ultimately lead the American University sophomore to develop a groundbreaking innovation in the long — and often inefficient — war on hunger. 
 
 After years of research, Belding, 20, has founded a sprawling online network that connects thousands of food pantries in 24 states, allowing them to quickly share surplus food that might have otherwise gone to waste. Pantries simply post their excess food to the program — and someone else in the network picks it up and puts it to use. The database has saved an estimated two tons of food. 
 
 L’Oréal Paris has since lauded the program, last week naming Belding one of its 10 women of worth. So has Arianna Huffington. And experts agree programs such as the interactive MEANS website, which stands for Matching Excess and Need for Stability, can close lapses in communication between pantries and chip away at the country’s colossal problem with chronic waste. 
 
 Food waste “needs to be addressed on multiple levels,” said Mathy Stanislaus, a senior official with the Environmental Protection Agency who works on ending food waste. “Part is wider knowledge of the problem, but also tools [like this] to reduce waste.” 
 
 The stakes couldn’t be higher. Food production accounts for around 10 percent of the national energy budget, uses half of the country’s land and consumes around 80 percent of all the freshwater used in the United States, according to a paper published in 2012 by the National Resources Defense Council. 
 
 That means, the study noted, Americans squander $165 billion every year on food destined for landfills, where the decomposition of organic matter emits 16 percent of the country’s methane — a greenhouse gas that’s 25 times more potent than carbon dioxide. 
 
 Even people who donate to their local pantries are contributing, to some degree, to the problem. Emergency food centers have long been the last stop for whatever’s lurking in the back of America’s cupboards. And so, people donate an endless supply of near-expired creamed corn, beans and Honeybuns. The excess of product often does one of two things. It expires on the shelf and gets thrown out. Or it clutters the pantry so much that nonprofits can’t accept premium donations that could immediately serve a community. 
 
 “It’s very common for grocers to give poorly selling products in bulk to emergency food providers,” Belding said. “That’s just fine. But when you get 400 jars of peanut butter and you have two weeks to get rid of them and serve 100 people a month, total, and only distribute four times a month, that rapidly becomes a problem.” 
 
 When Belding started researching the concept behind the MEANS database while in high school, she was sure someone had beaten her to it. But she soon realized that the emergent technologies that had upended so many industries — tools to discern opportunity in unlikely places — hadn’t yet found their way to the nation’s nonprofit food pantries. Around half of the phone numbers listed under food pantries, she said, didn’t even work. 
 
 Belding thought she might be onto something. In her mind, there was clear need for a network. And so, at the beginning of her freshman year, she arrived at a friend’s house and got to talking with his 24-year-old brother, Grant Nelson. Nelson, now a third-year law student at George Washington University and program co-founder, had experience with building programs. So she asked him if he could help. 
 
 He wasn’t sure he wanted to. “This struck me as a changing-people’s-behavior problem, rather than providing a tool to fulfill a need,” he said. “I said: ‘Phones exist. Emails exist. Twitter exists. Facebook exists. What could we possibly build that would be slicker for all of the food banks and food pantries to communicate with each other that isn’t already solved by something else?’ ” 
 
 In the end, he helped anyway. It took more than a year. A year of planning, researching and building program after program. Then in February, the website launched. 
 
 Months passed. In May, Belding was sitting in class when she saw one of their nascent users had posted an item to the site. This was the moment, she realized, when the project would either succeed or fail. A sense of panic seized her when she saw someone was giving away assorted varieties of canned beans. “They’re like the off-brand Mountain Dew in the food world,” Belding said. “You’ll take it only if you have no other option. . . . So we were all anxiously sitting by our computers hitting refresh, and I said, ‘Please, someone take this.’ And then, it’s gone. It just disappeared. . . . The beans had moved.” 
 
 “We were kind of desperate,” said Stephanie Shallah, an official with the District’s So Others Might Eat who had posted the item. “Beans come so often to me that I didn’t think anyone would want them. So I said, ‘I’m going to just post it and see what happens.’ I said, ‘I have nothing to lose.’ ” She said a Landover pantry serving a large Hispanic population took the goods. 
 
 Things then happened very quickly for MEANS. The organization now commands a staff of several programmers paid through grant money and even a few interns who Belding concedes are older than she. The number of members on the site has grown from around 50 larger food banks in June to more than 200, opening up a network of thousands of smaller-shop pantries that work under the umbrella of those banks. 
 
 But there’s still a lot of work to do, Belding said. There are still 26 states that remain untapped. There’s still the world. Belding said she had more calls to make. More connections to forge. ||||| Tears roll down Teva Sakima’s cheeks as she describes the look of heartbreak on her parents’ faces when they struggled to put food on the table. She remembers family meals as a child with very little to go around. 
 
 “Those feelings are hard to forget,” she said. “Nobody should go to bed hungry. It’s not okay.” 
 
 An estimated 15 million children live in households where adequate, nutritious food is limited. They’re among the nearly 50 million Americans who are struggling to avoid hunger today, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture. 
 
 Sakima, now shift supervisor of a Starbucks store, is one of many partners (employees) who have wanted to feed people who face hunger by donating surplus food from Starbucks stores. The idea sounds simple, but food safety policies required baristas to discard salads, sandwiches and other refrigerated items after the designated expiration date even if the food could still be consumed. 
 
 Starbucks has been investing in research and quality assurance testing to develop a way to safely donate fresh food. 
 
 Today, Starbucks is announcing FoodShare – a program to donate ready-to-eat meals to food banks from its 7,600 company-operated stores in the U.S. Initially, this will be accomplished through an existing collaboration with Food Donation Connection and a new partnership with Feeding America. 
 
 In the first year alone, Starbucks® FoodShare will be able to provide nearly 5 million meals to individuals and families in need of nourishing food. Starbucks intends to scale this program over the next five years and rescue 100 percent of its food available for donation from participating company-operated U.S. stores. That amounts to almost 50 million meals by 2021. 
 
 “Like many of our social impact initiatives, the innovation and inspiration comes from our partners who are volunteering in and contributing to their communities,” said John Kelly, senior vice president, Starbucks Global Responsibility, Community and Public Policy. “They saw the need for us to do more, and find a way to use our scale to bring more nourishing and ready-to-eat meals to those in need.” 
 
 ‘Partners are the heroes’ 
 
 Since 2010, Starbucks stores have donated pastries through the support of Food Donation Connection (FDC), a service provider that collects pastries at the company’s stores after they can no longer be sold to customers. Starbucks worked with FDC to develop a safe process to add perishable food to the pick-up, which will be implemented in participating company-operated stores in the U.S. by this time next year. 
 
 “When we thought about our vast store footprint across the U.S. and the impact we could make, it put a fire under us to figure out how to donate this food instead of throwing it away,” said Jane Maly, brand manager, Starbucks Food team. “The challenge was finding a way to preserve the food’s quality during delivery. We focused on maintaining the temperature, texture and flavor of the surplus food, so when it reached a person in need, they could safely enjoy it.” 
 
 Starbucks recently established a partnership with Feeding America – the largest domestic hunger-relief and food-rescue nonprofit in the U.S. – to redistribute unsold food. Through this process, a refrigerated van will pick up food from Starbucks stores each day and deliver it to the Feeding America network. 
 
 “This food is going to make a difference, whether it’s a child not going hungry for the night or a family that’s able to enjoy a protein plate that they would not have otherwise been able to afford at Starbucks,” said Kienan McFadden, a Starbucks store manager. “Rescuing food in this way from being thrown away will change lives. It makes me proud to know partners are the heroes in this.” 
 
 Living Our Values 
 
 The company’s new program could potentially expand with refrigerated vans making additional stops at other restaurants that join in the effort, increasing the impact exponentially. 
 
 “We applaud Starbucks for its leadership and commitment to ending hunger. Their program will have a tremendous impact in communities, and it is also a testament of how we can work together to help more individuals and families achieve food security,” said Diana Aviv, CEO of Feeding America. 
 
 In addition to feeding people who struggle with hunger, diverting food surplus from landfills furthers Starbucks goal to minimize the company’s environmental footprint and inspire other companies to do the same. With an estimated 70 billion pounds of food waste in America each year, according to Feeding America, Starbucks hopes to encourage other businesses to put a focus on food rescue. 
 
 “Our hope is by taking this first step, other companies will see the possibility for their participation and together we will make great strides in combating hunger,” said Cliff Burrows, group president, Starbucks U.S. and Americas. “FoodShare will not only make our partners proud, but once again will allow us to live our values.” 
 
 For more information on this story, contact the Starbucks Newsroom
– There are 48 million Americans who, at some point each year, may be unable to get enough food. Meanwhile, a third of the country's food goes to waste. This isn't as easy an issue to solve as it sounds—something Maria Rose Belding realized while volunteering at a soup pantry as a teen. At one point, the pantry received 10,000 boxes of mac 'n cheese, but couldn't find enough people in need before the stuff expired, reports Quartz. "We were throwing away all of this food just because we couldn't communicate," Belding tells the Washington Post. Now a 20-year-old American University student, Belding hopes the app and website she co-created can help: Overflowing pantries list what extra food they have available on the MEANS (Matching Excess and Need for Stability) Database, and neighboring pantries get notifications, Belding writes at the Huffington Post. Grocery stores and restaurants with food to unload can make use of the site, too. Belding remembers watching the first donation of canned beans pop up after MEANS launched in February. "We were all anxiously sitting by our computers hitting refresh," she says—the anxiety intensified by the fact that beans are donated so regularly they aren't a hot commodity. Suddenly, "it just disappeared." Since then, the database has kept 4,000 pounds of food from the trash. While a similar service saved 50 million pounds of food in New York in 2015 by matching donations with food kitchens, MEANS allows smaller organizations to do the ground work themselves, and currently has 200 accounts across 27 states. While grants and awards keep the site running for now, Belding has plans: to track large retailers' donations from a tax-benefit perspective, something most don't currently do since those donations are made on such a local level. MEANS would charge a small fee for doing all the tracking. (On the food front, this young chef has left one of the world's best restaurants to try to save America's school lunch program.)