Kaizen Food Rescue Is Feeding the Community, One Box at a Time

“I am a refugee, a survivor of war atrocities before coming to the U.S.,” says Thai Nguyen, founder and executive director of Kaizen Food Rescue. After fleeing Vietnam, she and her mother went through four refugee camps before arriving in Florida. Then in 1992, the family was once again displaced, this time by Hurricane Andrew, and landed in Southern California.

After college, Nguyen worked as a corporate event planner, a role that slowly burned her out until she came to Colorado for a vacation thirteen years ago and met her now-husband while snowboarding. She quit her job and moved to the metro area to start a family, becoming a stay-at-home mom.

When Nguyen volunteered to pick up provisions from Food Bank of the Rockies for her children’s Montessori school, she remembers the organizers telling her that "if we didn’t pick up the food, everything would be thrown out. And I was just shocked, because I came from experiencing food insecurity growing up. We’re in the land of abundance, but so much is going to waste, so we decided to start a nonprofit to actually distribute this food."

Kaizen launched in 2019; the name, Nguyen explains, is inspired by the Japanese business philosophy popularized by Toyota, which focuses on continuous incremental improvement and celebrates a bottom-up culture. "We filled up my husband’s Astro van and just thought it was the most amazing thing ever. We were able to share food with everybody,” she recalls. The couple found a landlord willing to provide warehouse space for free in Englewood and started renting U-Haul trucks and setting up mobile markets and pop-ups. (Kaizen still uses the same warehouse at a deep discount.)
The organization prides itself on offering fresh, healthy produce, which is often hard to come by at traditional food pantries. In fact, Kaizen deliberately calls itself a food share to reflect its focus on being a communal offering versus a charity. It prides itself on being in tune with the communities it serves, offering “culturally responsive and sensitive foods that we know our community wants,” Nguyen says.

For example, at the Edgewater location, “we serve the Vietnamese and the Latino community. ... There’s a lot of Vietnamese elders who come to live here, and a few Arabic families," so Kaizen sources ingredients such as chayote squash, ginger, spearmint, Thai basil, kabocha pumpkins and green onions. “We get a lot of kale donations, and unfortunately, our community doesn’t really get that,” she notes, laughing. "So I’m like, ‘Oh, thank you, but can you grow Napa cabbage?’”

Today, Kaizen has eleven pop-up locations in the metro area, and Nguyen estimates that it distributes 18,000 to 20,000 pounds of food a day. Last year it distributed $14.2 million worth of food, and it's one of Food Bank of the Rockies’ biggest distributors. Kaizen also receives local donations and uses grant money to purchase from BIPOC farmers and ranchers such as Minoru Farm, FrontLine Farming and Emerald Gardens. 

Despite its growth, Nguyen remains Kaizen’s sole employee; a team of fifteen to twenty volunteers managed by paid community navigators helps run each site. “It’s fun, it’s community. ... There are language barriers, there are personality barriers, and everyone just works together to get something done every week,” says Rosanne Venack, who is Ngyuen’s aunt by marriage. She started volunteering for Kaizen during the pandemic, when “there was probably two to three times the food every week. ... Thai’s a force. She got people together, and we’d sometimes work until 6 or 7 p.m. to get the food out.”
The food shares typically happen four days a week and start around noon. We recently visited the Edgewater location, Kaizen’s home hub. When we arrived at 11 a.m., volunteers had already been on site for hours, organizing that day’s donations into individual boxes.

By 11:30, seventeen cars were lined up. “If you’re not here by noon, you’re around the corner," says a woman in the third vehicle waiting. "The amount of food they give is very generous. ... They are very generous and kind, and they just load you up with whatever they have.”

When the food share starts, it's controlled chaos. A volunteer named De Loriannia runs the line with commanding, mother bear-type energy. She gestures to each car in front to move forward, asking, “Aquí or in the back?” as she taps the back-seat windows.

Her crew rushes forward with boxes filled to the brim with vegetables, fruit and other groceries. More than a few times, oranges spill out, rolling around on the ground as volunteers lunge to grab them. Strollers, duffel bags and sports equipment are shuffled around in trunks to make room for food. “Dos huevos!” Loriannia shouts as one volunteer rushes forward with two cartons of eggs to pass through a passenger-side window.

“You want cabbage?” Loriannia asks. If the person nods yes, she snaps her finger and another volunteer appears with a fifty-pound bag and proceeds to cram it into any free nook. The whole time, Loriannia gossips and jokes with the car occupants. Sometimes she’ll roll her eyes and shake her head, “No, enough, move!” She’s been full-time with Kaizen for three years and is fiercely loyal to Nguyen, calling herself "Thai’s pitbull."

“Working the line, I see the dark side," Loriannia says. "When I first came in, I had to weed out all the bad guys. ... If I blinked, it was gone." She points to a pallet of oranges in crates. "Nobody needs that much...so I purposely followed somebody one day, and they took me right to their food truck, and I was like, 'What are you doing? We’re not here to fund your food truck. Nuh-uh-uh. Thai, she works too hard for you to steal from her.'”
But both Nguyen and Loriannia are clear: They do not conduct means tests. Volunteers will often load trunks of BMWs and Rivians. Loriannia shrugs: “Look, anyone can be struggling. Anyone can fall on hard times, and if you need food, you need food.”

Today, Lorianna works with a hand-picked crew of trusted volunteers. The group is a tight-knit family, joking with each other, sometimes fake groaning and yelling, “A loca woman is running the line! Help us!” But they snap to and instantly follow her commands, hauling pounds of groceries, sometimes nonstop for hours.

Loriannia tells someone in a Toyota to pull over before she runs back to the warehouse. The volunteers load up the car, and the driver is about to pull away when she returns with a comforter and a box of Pampers. The woman in the passenger seat is pregnant, and Loriannia pulls her out of the car to give her the gifts along with a hug. “I might talk shit, but only to those trying to scam us. And then other people I give extra to if they feed a lot of families, so it’s a delicate balance,” she says. “I’m really good at it. I can talk crazy to them because they know me and they see me in the streets [when] I’m doing a lot of outreach.”

During the food shares, Kaizen's community navigators will often share resources with those in the car line, including contacts for immigration lawyers and housing assistance as well as invitations to the organization's community listening sessions and workshops on advocacy, trauma-informed healing, promotora (community health worker) training and leadership development. Kaizen also recently broke ground on a permaculture Vietnamese food forest at the Vietnamese Central Baptist Church in Edgewater.

“This work, it’s lovely, it’s an honor. But it’s also draining," Nguyen admits. "There’s a lot of vicarious trauma that happens as well, and having time for my family is really tough. My kids are asking for more Mom time.”

Soon, Nguyen may have to cut back on much of Kaizen’s programming, as pandemic-era American Rescue Plan Act funds for food pantries in Colorado will run out by the end of the year. Those interested in supporting the organization can sign up online to volunteer or donate funds and food.

“If you have a backyard and grow food, you can always grow an extra row for us and donate it at any of our food share locations,” Nguyen says. “But even if you don’t donate to us, there are so many other organizations that we work with in the metro area that it’s almost like donating to us anyway. If you’re helping one organization, you’re overall helping everybody.”

For more information on Kaizen, including food share locations and volunteer opportunities, visit kaizenfoodrescue.org.