Leket Israel

Leket Israel – the National Food Bank, rescues fresh agricultural produce and nutritious cooked meals and produces frozen soups from surplus vegetables and distributes it to Israelis in need throughout the country. Food rescue is the collection and delivery of quality edible food that would otherwise have been discarded to populations suffering from food and nutritional insecurity.
Food rescue increases food supply without additional loss of natural and economic resources, reduces food and nutrition insecurity, and contributes to the reduction of pollution and greenhouse gas emissions caused by food production and waste.

Joseph Gitler, Founder and Voluntary Chairman, immigrated to Israel in 2000. He founded Leket Israel in 2003 as a one-man volunteer operation to respond to the paradox of growing hunger and poverty in Israel on the one hand and significant food waste on the other.

In 2025, Leket Israel distributed food through a network of 346 nonprofit partner agencies, feeding 470,000+ Israelis in need each week. The recipients include the elderly, Holocaust survivors, the homeless, youth at risk, single parent families, women at risk, and families in need who suffer from nutritional insecurity and lack access to healthy food.

Food rescue has 3 main advantages:
The Economic Benefit: Food waste is detrimental to economic productivity due to the production and labor costs that are irretrievably lost. Food rescue means converting waste with zero or negative value into a product that has a positive economic value and provides nutrition to underprivileged populations without the need to invest additional resources into production.
The Social Benefit: Food rescue improves public health and tackles social inequalities by reducing food and nutrition insecurity and helping close cost of living gaps in vulnerable populations.

The Environmental Benefit: Food rescue reduces pollutants while conserving valuable land and water resources. It also reduces costs and emissions from waste removal and disposal in landfills where decomposing food releases significant amounts of methane.

Leket Israel’s 10th Food Waste and Rescue Report was published in 2025 by Leket Israel and BDO, was written in collaboration with the Ministry of Environmental Protection and the Ministry of Health. The Report presents a comprehensive and up to date picture of the scope of food waste in Israel, the potential for food rescue, and its economic, social, health, and environmental impacts.

Food insecurity is a persistent issue in the State of Israel; however, the Food Waste and Rescue Report reveals a disturbing picture of food waste in Israel. Over the past decade, food worth $57 billion (NIS 211 billion) has been discarded. In 2024 alone, 2.6 million tons of food were wasted, with a total value of $7 billion (NIS 26.2 billion), representing 39% of all food produced in Israel. At the same time, around 1.5 million residents live with food insecurity, and approximately half of the food that was wasted was still fit for consumption and could have reached hundreds of thousands of families in need.

Food waste has far-reaching consequences beyond the economic sphere. The annual health cost associated with food insecurity is estimated at $1.57 billion (NIS 5.8 billion), while the environmental cost of food waste reaches $1.14 billion (NIS 4.2 billion) per year.

Alongside these stark figures, the Report points to a clear and practical solution: food rescue. Food rescue is an immediate, cost effective, and sustainable solution, with every shekel invested generating NIS 10.7 in value for the national economy.

Over the past decade, together with many partners, Leket Israel has helped lead a significant shift in public awareness and policy. This includes amendments to the Food Donation Act, integrating food rescue into government programs, establishing measurement principles, and anchoring official policy documents in the data and insights presented in the Report.