At 8:30 a.m. on an early October morning, an enthusiastic Erin Stieglitz pulls into the parking lot of Goldberg’s Fine Foods in Buckhead.
Her Arcadia SUV is already filled to the brink.
“There’s about what, maybe like 15 bags here,” she observes. “So that’s probably seven, 800 bagels so far.”
The metro Atlanta resident is the founder of Bagel Rescue, a nonprofit organization aiming to reduce food waste and support hunger relief.
She packed the bags of yeast-raised hard-crusted circular rolls into her car, which she has named “The Bagel Mobile,” from the Brookhaven Regional Hub of Bagel Rescue. Also known as her garage.
The 501-c3 organization partners with 50 local bakeries — like Goldberg’s — to “rescue” unsold bagels.
“Bagel shops work off this model of selling a freshly made bagel every day,” she explains. “And so at the end of the day, they have to throw away whatever’s left over. And so sometimes that’s a lot.”
The bread rolls are semi-perishable, so they don’t need to be refrigerated or frozen immediately.
“And so instead of throwing away that good food, we’re just taking it from them and giving it to somebody else,” Stieglitz adds.
The idea began during the COVID-19 pandemic when Stieglitz’s son, Rhys, coordinated a holiday breakfast for essential workers at Northside Hospital.
He reached out to a local bakery, Goldberg’s, for help supplying food. Quickly, the elder Stieglitz realized how many bagels were going to waste.
“Depending on location, some of them, we may only have two- or three-hundred. In some locations, we’ll have 1,500 left every day,” says Jennifer Johnson, director of restaurant operations at the bakery.
“I’ve been that mom who couldn’t feed my kids … So to me, it’s heartbreaking to watch any kind of food go into the trash,” she added.
In Georgia, 13% of the population is food insecure, meaning they lack reliable access to a sufficient quantity of affordable, nutritious food.
Each week, Stieglitz coordinates a network of over 150 volunteers to pick up and deliver bagels to food pantries, shelters and community outreach efforts across nine metro Atlanta counties.
To date, Bagel Rescue has made more than 14,000 bagel deliveries totaling over 2 million bagels and counting. Rescue locations include places such as Clyde’s Kitchen at Crossroads Community Ministries — a program that provides meals to those in need in Downtown Atlanta.
Chef D. Chalit says there’s a variety of things that you can create with the bagels, noting that he and his staff at Clyde’s Kitchen do 50 sack lunches a day for their guests.
“And we make bagel sack lunch sandwiches,” he added while walking across the kitchen with Stieglitz.
A few miles across town at the Salvation Army Outreach, Chef Alberto Bermudez uses the bagels for meatloaf and mac and cheese toppings.
And at Raising Expectations, an afterschool youth program in Vine City, Tamara Burke serves bagels as a snack to kids — some of whom have never tasted a bagel before.
“For them, it’s a new adventure,” says Burke, explaining that serving bagels helps build relationships and teach students other lessons.
She says now, the kids look forward to the variety of flavors.
For Stieglitz, it’s about the power of the circle.
The former PR professional says she never thought she’d be running a nonprofit organization out of her garage, but she saw an issue and found a solution.
“Growing Bagel Rescue was like raising my children,” she said. “You know, you don’t know how to do everything at the beginning, right? But you learn as you go. You grow with your kids. And I feel like I’ve grown with Bagel Rescue.”
Now, this is a full-time venture that she believes can work in other cities across the country — with help from volunteers.
“I hope that Bagel Rescue is an inspiration for people to take action.”
