Revolutionizing · Modernizing · Simplifying
Revolutionizing · Modernizing · Simplifying
Picture a woman in a full potato costume, standing in a parking lot off East 39th Avenue, watching 42,000 pounds of spuds disappear faster than anybody planned.
That was Monday, July 27, 2026. The place was the Park Hill Food Recovery Hub at 6090 E. 39th Ave. And the woman in the potato suit was Caroline Hissong, who runs communications for a Denver nonprofit called We Don't Waste. She had a three hour window, 9 a.m. to noon, to move 21 tons of potatoes into the arms of anyone who wanted them.
It took about 90 minutes. Gone by 10:30. Well before lunch.
Here is the part people miss about food recovery. The potatoes were never bad. They were surplus, sitting with a logistics company that had gotten them from a farmer somewhere in the Midwest. Nobody would buy them for store shelves. So they were headed for a landfill, which is the fate of a staggering amount of perfectly good food in this country.
We Don't Waste got the call on short notice. The trailer showed up Saturday, July 25. And the nonprofit made a decision most groups would flinch at. They said yes to all 42,000 pounds at once.
Then they had to figure out what to do with a mountain of potatoes before it turned into a problem.
The answer was Potato Palooza. No limits. No cost. Bring tote bags, boxes, wagons, or straight up back a pickup truck into the lot and load it. Take as many as you can carry.
"We genuinely have too many potatoes, I cannot stress enough," Hissong told Denverite before the event.
I love that quote. It is the least corporate sentence a nonprofit has ever produced.
So here is the thing about this town. You put out a call for a good cause and people show up fast. Really fast.
The Denverite writeup on the giveaway went viral. Shared nationally. People in California were passing it around, which tells you something about how a simple story of free potatoes travels when everybody is squeezed on groceries.
And the numbers underneath this are not funny at all. We Don't Waste pointed out that one in three Denver adults are skipping meals right now because food costs keep climbing. One in three. That is your neighbor, the guy at your gym, somebody in your kid's class. When you hear that, a trailer of free potatoes stops being a quirky local story and starts being groceries somebody actually needed.
The community, as Hissong's team put it, showed up. All 21 tons, cleared in an hour and a half by folks with wagons and totes and truck beds.
Look, the potato costume is the hook. The real story is what We Don't Waste does the rest of the week when nobody is wearing a spud suit.
They run mobile markets twice a week. Free food, distributed around the metro, aimed squarely at the gap between what groceries cost and what a lot of Denver households can actually spend right now. Potato Palooza was a one off because a trailer landed on their doorstep. The mobile markets are the steady thing. That is the part worth putting in your phone.
If your budget is tight, or you know somebody whose budget is tight, this is a real resource and not a hypothetical one. You can check the schedule and future distribution events at wedontwaste.org. That is the whole point of me writing this. A story about free potatoes is fun. A neighbor knowing where the next free market is parked is better.
Quick note on location, because I always am. The Park Hill Food Recovery Hub sits in the northeast Park Hill area, off 39th near the old industrial and warehouse stretch that has been quietly shifting for years. This is not the polished Park Hill of the bungalows and the big trees down south. This is the working edge of the neighborhood, the kind of pocket where an operation like a food recovery hub can actually get a trailer in and out and give people room to load up.
It is a smart spot for what they do. Accessible, not precious, close to the neighborhoods that need it most.
Twenty one tons of potatoes were about to rot in a landfill. Instead they fed a chunk of Denver in 90 minutes, handed out by a woman dressed as a potato, on a Monday morning most of us slept through.
That is a good day for a city, if you ask me.
And the next one does not require a costume or a viral article. It is the twice a week mobile markets, running whether or not anybody is watching. So if money is tight, or you just want to know where to send a friend, wedontwaste.org has the schedule.
Bring a bag. There will not always be 42,000 pounds. But there will be food, and it will be free, and somebody in this town clearly cares whether you eat.