In Israel, food waste rarely announces itself. It accumulates quietly: in fields left unharvested, in hotel kitchens serving the same meals again and again, and in household refrigerators where yesterday’s produce is pushed to the back. According to the latest data compiled by Leket Israel, 26.2 billion shekels of food is discarded each year– 2.6 million tons that disappear without ceremony. Over the past decade, the total has reached 221 billion shekels. For Gidi Kroch, Leket Israel’s CEO, these numbers are not abstract. “If someone took that money directly from your pocket,” he says, “we’d all be on the barricades.”
Kroch, the CEO of Israel’s largest food-rescue organization, has mastered speaking on both scales simultaneously. He can mention a peeled tangerine delicately placed on a child’s plate in a hotel lobby and also cite that 221 billion shekels’ worth of food was wasted in Israel over ten years. To him, the connection is clear: “Food,” he declares, “is never just food.” This year, Leket Israel published its tenth Food Waste and Rescue Report, which has become the country’s most trusted record of abundance and waste.
The data is staggering: annually, 26.2 billion shekels worth of food goes to waste; 2.6 million tons are discarded; this results in about 10,000 shekels lost per household each year. Kroch explains that over a decade, an Israeli family loses roughly 100,000 shekels. If that money were taken directly from your pocket, it would cause outrage. Interestingly, the report reveals a paradox: the volume of food waste has decreased while its monetary value has increased. While it might be tempting to credit rising public awareness or Leket Israel’s growth for this trend, Kroch dismisses that idea. “I would love to compliment ourselves,” he admits, “but that wouldn’t be honest.”
The real reason, he explains, is simpler and harsher: food has become expensive. “When you’re holding an expensive product, you think twice before throwing it away.” People buy less and stretch leftovers further. “The tomato of today becomes tomorrow’s shakshuka.” He agrees awareness helps, but emphasizes that economics does the heavy lifting. This refusal to celebrate itself is typical. Kroch often redirects discussions from moral issues to systems like supply chains, incentives, and infrastructure. “We are not a welfare organization,” he states directly. “We provide an economic solution to food loss.” He stresses that distributing food to those in need stems from Leket Israel’s efforts, not its main goal. “Our primary activity is food rescue.”
This focus has become sharper since the war, which disrupted almost every assumption about food, labor, and logistics in Israel. Farmers in the north and south lost workers overnight, and produce ripened without harvesters. Meanwhile, humanitarian aid has affected local markets. Kroch explains, “Much of the fruits and vegetables are now sold to what we call the tertiary market,” referring to Gaza. “That’s fine of course, but it causes shortages for us because the items we used to collect are now sold elsewhere.”
He sees the contradiction as temporary: “When there’s a shortage, farmers grow more. When they grow more, surpluses happen." Still, he recognizes the need for adaptation. Kroch has designated 2026 as a “year of operations" after a challenging fundraising phase. “There’s donor fatigue,” he notes, "after two and a half years of continuous giving.” His approach is practical: expand infrastructure, improve logistics, hire drivers, and increase capacity. “Money is the fuel,” he explains, "while results are the food collections.” When Leket Israel moves from spreadsheets to community engagement, the most meaningful moments happen away from conference rooms.
One such moment unfolded quietly in a hotel lobby, when evacuees from Israel’s border communities were housed in temporary accommodations. “How much hotel food can you eat?” Kroch remembers asking his team. “But ultimately, how long can you live on that?” The question prompted a simple experiment: ten produce stands, restocked weekly with fruits and vegetables. Initially, the emphasis was on "things you can just grab and eat," as Kroch described it. Later, requests for onions and potatoes appeared, indicating that people were cooking in their rooms, and an unexpected outcome emerged: These stands became de-facto community centers.
Kroch describes how elderly residents would peel citrus fruit for children and placing slices on plates. “Because citrus isn’t always accessible to kids,” the children lingered, conversations began to flow, and the stands became gathering points. “It shows what food can do,” Kroch reflects. “Not just nourish, but build a community.” The project echoed an different moment during the Rising Lion Operation evacuations, when the Ministry of Health asked Leket Israel to replicate the model. “The next day, the stands were there,” he says. The intervention was brief; the impact lingered. What stayed with him, Kroch says, was not the efficiency of the distribution but the social glue it created. “It connected a community that wasn’t really cohesive.”
This idea, that food is infrastructure, not charity, runs through everything Kroch describes. It also underpins Leket Israel’s most significant and most expensive undertaking of the past year: transporting volunteers to farmers’ fields. Providing buses, coordinating schedules, and ensuring participants – it all adds up. “It’s very expensive,” Kroch says.
But the scale is unprecedented: nearly 120,000 volunteers this year, 80,000 of them harvesting directly for farmers. “Without these volunteers,” he says, “the farmers wouldn’t have been able to harvest.” The project, he argues, connects disparate worlds: Israeli retirees, young people, Jews from abroad, agriculture, labor shortages, and national crisis. He recounts one conversation that has stayed with him.
A retired man from Jerusalem told him: “I wanted so badly to help. I can’t cook. And even if I could, who would I give it to? Then I heard you were taking people to harvest in the south. You gave me the opportunity to contribute.” Kroch pauses when he tells this story. “That’s incredibly moving,” he says. It’s also instructive. Leket Israel didn’t invent altruism; it created a channel for it. “We see a need, we see a solution, and we connect them,” he explains. “And then wonderful things happen around it.” He admits he feared volunteer numbers would drop this year. Instead, they grew from 90,000 to 120,000. “It’s crazy,” he says, almost incredulous. Social media and word of mouth play a role, but so does something less tangible: a hunger for usefulness. “People are looking for something that has value,” he says.
Leket Israel, with its buses, clipboards, and muddy fields, has become a place where that desire can land. The decade report contextualizes these stories within a broader reflection. Kroch emphasizes that food waste is not a niche environmental concern or merely about poverty reduction. Instead, it intersects with economics, health, climate, and governance. “Every part of the supply chain considers losses in pricing,” he notes. “And ultimately, we all pay.” This perspective has helped the report gain recognition within government. What started as a civil- society effort has become, according to Kroch, “the Bible” of food- rescue data.
Government bodies like the Ministries of Environmental Protection and Health are now official partners; even the Ministry of Agriculture, recently renamed to include food security, is moving closer. “Food rescue is part of food security,” Kroch states. “That's not ideology. It's math.” Nonetheless, he avoids utopian promises. “We will never achieve zero food loss,” he admits. “Just like complete poverty eradication is impossible.” The aim isn’t perfection but reduction. “Between zero and 100, 100,000 shekels, there' s a huge range.”
Policies, infrastructure, and incentives can influence Israel' s position within that range. When asked about future projections, Kroch hesitates. He hopes for significant reductions but also entertains a more radical idea: that Leket Israel itself might need to change- or even step aside. “If more organizations, companies – even profitable ones – enter this field,” he suggests, “maybe Leket Israel won't need to do exactly what it does now.” Perhaps the organization will evolve into an advocacy group, sharing Israeli expertise internationally.
“We possess the knowledge,” Kroch asserts. “There is no reason to keep it to ourselves.” This statement hints at a rare willingness in the nonprofit sector: to consider one's own obsolescence.
For now, though, Leket Israel remains engaged in the tangible realities: fields needing harvest, food that risks rotting, volunteers waiting for a bus. Kroch repeatedly emphasizes that food waste isn’t invisible money, not inevitable loss, and not someone else' s problem. “It' s all interconnected,” he explains. Prices, health, environment, dignity. From a peeled tangerine and a billion-shekel spreadsheet.
This article was written in cooperation with Leket Israel.