December’s edition of the 79°West Breakfast Club welcomed Chef Sera Cuni, the owner and head chef of Root Cellar Café & Catering in Chapel Hill and the MOSAIC-adjacent Café Root Cellar in Pittsboro, as its speaker.
Cuni shared how her nonprofit initiative, Feed-Well Fridges, is addressing food insecurity in Chatham County by transforming potential food waste into free, nutritious meals for the community.
The inspiration for Feed-Well Fridges struck during the early days of the COVID-19 shutdown, when Chef Cuni realized that all of the perishables in her walk-in would become waste unless they were repurposed. As she began turning produce into prepared dishes to be donated to CORA, she began to think differently about systemic food waste within the restaurant industry.
Feed-Well Fridges launched in August 2023, transforming restaurant waste, imperfect produce and donations from local farmers into microwaveable meals freely available to those in need.
Since then, Feed-Well Fridges has expanded to six Chatham County locations and rescued more than 250,000 lbs. of food from landfills.
Often recognized for her appearances on the Food Network, Cuni told Breakfast Club attendees that the exposure has opened doors for even bigger impacts on community hunger. Now that Feed-Well has officially outgrown Café Root Cellar, she is in the process of raising funds for a large commissary kitchen with the ultimate goal of a Feed-Well Fridge in every school.
“The legacy of a chef is normally a cookbook,” Cuni shared, “but Feed-Well is mine. It’s the mutual aid we can do. We have a voice now.”
