Yum! Brands Helps Feed the World

Food and inspiration, locally and internationally

By: Tamsen Merrill

Published On: August 31, 2010

When food is a company’s business, part of the question is, “What are people eating?” When the company cares, the other part is, “Who doesn’t have food?”

Louisville’s Yum! Brands, the world’s largest restaurant company, started responding to that question by giving back locally, then opening up to the global community. Laura Melillo, executive director of the Yum! Brands Foundation explains the progression. “We had been partnering with Dare to Care for nine years. Our employees in Louisville rallied time, commitment and friends around their cause. We took baby steps, then gained a larger perspective. In 2007, we thought, ‘Why not all around the world?’”

Every October, Yum! employees around the world do what they need to do to raise awareness and funds all around the globe. “Bike races through the Pyrenees, car washes, whether it raises $5 or $5,000, they do it.” The World Food Programme (WFP), which partners with Yum! Brands in its World Hunger Relief movement, estimates the average cost to feed a child in a developing country to be less than 25 cents. “That’s how we put it into terms people can understand,” Melillo says.

“The unfortunate combination of the economy and natural disasters over the past few years has launched more need worldwide than any other time in recent memory,” she says. The company has worked closely with the WFP to ensure that emergency supplies of food are released quickly to those in greatest need. The Foundation and the company’s World Hunger Relief campaign contributed $1 million to the WFP’s emergency relief efforts in Haiti, and over $30 million was raised by the campaign over the last three years. The WFP recently named Yum! Brands their Partner of the Year for 2010.

The company still stays deeply involved locally, and with good reason. “One in five children in Kentucky risk going to bed hungry every night,” explains Melillo. Recently, the company rallied its employees to work with Dare to Care to pack 60,000 pounds of food for children during off-school seasons, when children miss two school-subsidized meals a day. “More than 200,000 are at risk of starvation. That’s just not acceptable,” she said with passion. In the state and around the nation, Yum! Brands has established a meals program through its restaurants, in which prepared food left over after the stores close is donated to local organizations. “It’s food that was prepared to order but perhaps wasn’t right or wasn’t needed. It’s food left over at the end of the day. Perfectly good food, and we don’t want to throw it away.”

Part of Yum! Brands’ current ambition is to establish a model that other organizations can use and follow. Considering how rough the road has been lately, this is a good team to follow.