What Does KFC Do With Leftover Food?

With over 30,000 restaurants worldwide, including thousands in the United States alone, KFC is one of the world's largest chains. With all those locations, it's no surprise that KFC has a system for putting leftovers to good use. Its parent company, Yum! Brands, first established Harvest in 1992 as a way to donate leftover food, and KFC itself has been running a Harvest Food Donation Program in the U.S. since 1999.

KFC's Harvest Food Donation Program has the twin-purpose mission of "feeding local community members in need while directly reducing food waste." The issue of community hunger isn't a small one: An estimated 48 million people currently experience food insecurity in the U.S. alone. Thanks to its sheer scale, KFC is able to donate leftover food to people who need it at a truly meaningful scale. In the 27 years since starting the program, the chain has donated a staggering 92 million meals across more than 4,300 nonprofits in the U.S.

Not only does KFC's Harvest Food Donation Program provide a social good by alleviating hunger within the local community, it also has the environmental benefit of preventing surplus food being sent to landfill. Donation programs like this help to improve KFC's public image, which has faced criticism in the past. There's an added benefit to the program: To encourage charitable corporate behavior, the U.S. offers enhanced tax deductions to businesses donating surplus food.

KFC runs its Harvest Food Program in a partnership with Food Donation Connection, an organization which works with many major chain restaurants to coordinate donation of their food leftovers, including other Yum! Brands restaurants, as well as Papa Johns. The donation process is straightforward: Leftover food is stored in airtight bags and tagged with its name, weight and the date, then Food Donation Connection matches the food to local nonprofits and charitable organizations, who distribute the food to the hungry. Similar to other chain restaurants donating food, the KFC Harvest Food Program is an optional, opt-in program for franchisee restaurants.

While the food being donated might be referred to as leftover food, this doesn't mean KFC is donating the scraps left on customers' plates. Leftovers come from a surplus of soon-to-expire food which hasn't been sold, from orders which were placed but not collected, or from orders which were made incorrectly, but are nonetheless perfectly fit for consumption. To ensure safety, Food Donation Connection requests that their partner restaurants chill or freeze donations while they're awaiting connection. Donors and distributors also have improved legal protections regarding food safety with donated food thanks to the Bill Emerson Good Samaritan Food Donation Act, which reduces KFC's liability in relation to food donated in good faith.