Why Chick-fil-A amplified its fight against hunger
5 Min Read
Ninety percent of Chick-fil-A restaurants donate excess food to local nonprofits in their communities.Photo courtesy of Chick-fil-A
Chick-fil-A has long worked to fight hunger. Owner-operator Marshall Wilkins came up with the idea to donate surplus food from his restaurant to a local nonprofit in his community of Knoxville, Tennessee, in the 1990s. The program was so effective, the chain formalized it in 2012, with logistics, internal goals, awareness campaigns and more, and began rolling it out throughout the system.
Shared Table is now in place at a whopping 90% of the chain, up 10% from just three years ago. Those restaurants partner with more than 1,600 nonprofit organizations nationwide.
It has been an important program for Chick-fil-A for years, but in 2021 — when Andrew Cathy took over as CEO — it became an even brighter North Star.
“We are passionate about using this business to make a difference. It goes back to how my grandfather created this business,” Cathy said during a recent interview in New York City.
Indeed, his inspiration to amplify the program internally came from his grandfather Truett, who founded the Dwarf House in 1946 that became the precursor to the first Chick-fil-A in 1967. Truett spent 46 years leading the company before his son Dan took over in 2013, followed by Andrew.
“My grandfather grew up in poverty. He lived in the first government housing in the state of Georgia. He grew up in a big family and would talk about how many times they didn’t have a meal,” Cathy said. “He would go to the grocery store to pick up food because you could buy things on credit and they wouldn’t let him buy anymore because they hadn’t paid their bills. As a family, they would share a couple of slices of bread and that was all they had.”
Growing up in such an extreme environment shaped Truett in a way that whenever he did have something extra, he had a list of people to help. This idea became a huge part of the company as it began to grow, and it remains so today.
The interview with Cathy took place at a Shared Table popup event at The Oculus in the Financial District of Manhattan. It included free chicken sandwiches, statistics to shine a light on the hunger crisis in the United States, and a donated meal to The Bowery Mission for each visitor who attended. The Bowery Mission is the chain’s Shared Table program partner in New York City that provides essential needs to New Yorkers with the goal of helping them overcome homelessness and poverty.
The popup was intentionally held on Sept. 30 — the last day of Hunger Awareness Month, to illustrate that hunger is a year-round problem. Beyond stories from his grandfather, Cathy also gained a strong perception as to just how big of a problem it is when he served on the board of the Atlanta Community Food Bank.
“That’s when it became a real understanding,” he said. “It’s hard to comprehend that in 2026, one in seven Americans don’t know where their next meal is going to come from. And it impacts every single county in the U.S. A lot of times we might perceive that it’s an issue in bigger cities, but it’s in every single county.”
That experience flipped a light switch to connect the issue of hunger with the business of food, and well beyond Chick-fil-A’s Shared Table program.
“Even with us having so many operators participating, we’re barely making a dent. How can we collaborate with others in the industry to really make a difference?” Cathy said. “We can be competitors in the marketplace, but we can work together to make a difference, and I’m really passionate about opportunities to do that.”
Cathy said he’s talked to “just about every CEO” in the restaurant industry and they have all expressed interest to work together. There is nothing in place yet, but he said they’re “getting close to having a goal.” He added that though Chick-fil-A has a stout program, there is much to learn from other companies putting forth such efforts as well, whether internally or through partnerships with organizations like No Kid Hungry.
“The learnings from each other have been really exciting,” he said. “We are an open book about what’s worked, what hasn’t. Others have shared what they’re doing. Everyone is opening up their books so we can really work together.”
The objective is simple — to reduce the 22 billion pounds of food that get thrown away every year and to increase the 4.5 billion pounds of food processed by Feeding America to help nourish hungry Americans. For its part, more than 50 million meals have been created through Chick-fil-A’s Shared Table program, including more than 8.6 million so far this year.
“Imagine if the whole industry was doing this. The impact could be massive, and I think a light lift to figure out how to get better at these things,” Cathy said. “We can do so much more together than we can do independently. There are great organizations doing incredible things but how do we make a collective goal? It’s going to take time to figure out the best way, but it has me fired up.”
His near-term goal is to continue facilitating discussions with competitors to come up with more solutions “holistically” and, perhaps most importantly, continue raising awareness throughout the industry and beyond.
“The fact that we have so many Americans that don’t know where their meals are coming from, I don’t think we talk about that enough,” he said. “The biggest thing is awareness, and the second thing is understanding how the process works to make a difference and get others to join.”
Contact Alicia Kelso at [email protected]
Follow her on TikTok: @aliciakelso
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