Every Saturday afternoon, the community room of the Rockwood Station Apartments in Gresham bustles with activity. There are mothers with kids in tow, elderly folks with walkers and Gen Z 20-somethings all waiting for Tania Thorkelson to call out their number.

“We open it up at 12:30, and the people come and grab a number and go sit down and wait till their number is called,” she explained.

Thorkelson lives in the complex and for years has been one of the volunteers helping run the Urban Gleaners Free Food Market happening here.

“When I first started, there were like 10 or 15 people at most, but like the past few months, it’s been doubled,” Thorkelson said.

A recent temporary pause on supplemental nutrition funding has brought food insecurity to the forefront of many conversations. Across Oregon, more than 740,000 people receive financial food assistance through the SNAP program, and there are still people in need.

More than 50 people showed up on a recent Saturday, including Malachi Gillis, who said he’s been struggling to make ends meet after a recent loss of household income.

“There is a lot of hesitancy, starting to go to food pantries,” Gillis said. “But everybody’s here for a reason because everybody needs food.”

And the 550 pounds of food at this market would have been thrown away had it not been rescued by Urban Gleaners. For nearly two decades, the Portland nonprofit has collected fresh food destined for the dump and redistributed it through markets just like this.

“I got most of the prepackaged stuff,” Gillis said. “I got bagels, there’s a ham and Swiss sandwich, we also got poke, which we used to get a lot when we had the money to.”

There was also organic milk and yogurt, overnight oats, boxes of salad greens and even pastel colored macarons with a $14 price tag for a box of five.

Currently, there are 42 weekly free food markets in the Portland metro area, more than half of which are open to the public. The markets are “barrier-free,” meaning shoppers do not have to show identification or proof of income. Set up similar to a farmers market, there are tables filled with fresh fruits and vegetables, baked goods and an array of ready-to-eat or pre-packaged meals like pastas, salads and sandwiches.

“Each month, we see anywhere between 80,000 to 105,000 pounds of food come into the space,” said Haris Kuljančić, the executive director of Urban Gleaners. “Our main partners are some of the big grocery stores in the area: Trader Joe’s, Zupans, New Seasons and Whole Foods.”

Originally from Bosnia and Herzegovina, Kuljančić said he has a personal connection to this work.

“I was born in the middle of a war, and my family came to the U.S. as refugees,” he said. “Almost immediately, we benefited from food access organizations [and] food banks.”

But the food Urban Gleaners receives is more than just grocery store stock. The nonprofit gleans fruits and vegetables from local farms, prepared meals from catering companies and excess food from the corporate kitchens of Nike and Intel.

The day I visited the warehouse, the team was unpacking a thousand pounds of shelf-stable food that came from a Navy ship.

“This one was definitely unique,” Kuljančić said. “For anything that isn’t shelf stable, like berries or seafood, it usually goes out the same day it comes in, but if we have a dry spell in terms of donations, we can lean on these [shelf stable] items more.”

Last year, Urban Gleaners rescued 1.2 million pounds of food.

So why is perfectly edible food being thrown away?

“Here’s a pack of what I’m assuming was four yogurts, with one of them broken off,” said Zia Laboff, a community support associate at Urban Gleaners. She’s working in the back warehouse of a local New Seasons Market, going through a pair of fridges overflowing with food.

“The date of expiration is like a month out, but because one of them broke off, they can’t sell it,” she said. “Perfect example of where we can come in.”

There’s also a shelf with fresh-baked bread that hadn’t sold the day before, and bunches of rainbow carrots, organic apples and a large box of grapes that, to my eye, look totally fine. Laboff says with produce, there’s often overstock stores need to get rid of.

And then there are some things that are near or past their “sell-by” date, which may mean they’re past peak freshness but not that they’ve gone bad. According to the U.S. Department of Agriculture, product dating is not required by federal regulations for anything other than baby formula. The dates you see on all your food come only from the manufacturer or retailer, and may actually contribute to unnecessary food waste.

Laboff is going through the fridge, squeezing packages to check for carbonation — a sure sign of spoilage — and rejecting anything that isn’t up to par.

“There’s so much food that is available when so many people are hungry; if it’s good, we’ll take it,” she said.

The food will make its way back out into the community, sometimes in just a few hours, via Urban Gleaners free food markets, which Laboff sees as a more equitable model for food distribution than some assistance programs of the past.

“When people are given [pre-selected] boxes of food, that’s a well-intended action, but that doesn’t account for people’s dietary restrictions, cultural preferences or taste,” Laboff said. “Letting people shop for themselves at a market just adds a lot of dignity to the situation.”

In addition to its markets, Urban Gleaners is trying to erase the stigma around gleaned foods in other ways, too. It collaborated with local chefs like Kann’s Gregory Gourdet and Sarah Minnick from Lovely’s Fifty Fifty for events using mostly gleaned ingredients and worked with Salt & Straw on an upcycled foods ice cream series.

Each week, Urban Gleaners feeds 8,500 Oregon families through its free food markets, and since its founding in 2006, it’s rescued more than 13 million pounds of food.

News Source : https://www.opb.org/article/2025/11/30/portland-nonprofit-urban-gleaners-free-food-markets/