There’s a version of the American food waste problem that sounds almost too simple: we have too much food and too many hungry people, and what we need is someone in the middle to connect the two. But spend five minutes with Eliza Blank, CEO of The Farmlink Project, and you realize just how much lives inside that “someone in the middle”—the relationships, the logistics, the split-second decisions, the money, the heart.
Blank came to Farmlink after more than a decade of building The Sill, the beloved houseplant brand she founded at 26 in her New York City apartment. She was selected from a massive pool of Farmlink applicants through a six-month global CEO search. What struck me most about our conversation wasn’t just the scale of what Farmlink moves—millions of pounds of surplus produce redirected before it ever becomes waste—but Blank’s refusal to frame any of it as a problem. To her, it’s an opportunity. And at a moment when government safety nets are fraying, and food banks are overwhelmed, that orientation feels less like wide-eyed optimism and more like what happens when a successful entrepreneur is presented with a very challenging problem and a team determined to help solve it.
This is a conversation about food, yes—but really, it’s about what it means to apply hard-won entrepreneurship skills to a non-profit model—one that millions depend on every day.
Can you tell us what Farmlink actually does and what led you to say yes to the CEO position?
At our core, Farmlink is a food systems organization. One might call us a food recovery organization, but we think more holistically about the work we do.
It really goes back to our origin story. Farmlink was founded in 2020 as a grassroots student movement. Our two co-founders were literally sent home as juniors and seniors during COVID, and they wanted to help their local food bank. The food bank said, “Look, we don’t need volunteers—what we need is food, and ideally fresh, healthy food.”
At that time, there was extensive coverage of food waste. During COVID, one arm of the food business shut down overnight. If you’re a farmer, you’re either selling into retail or hospitality, and the hospitality world just evaporated—hotels, schools, restaurants, everything closed.
Farmers had no idea what to do with their food. The founders of Farmlink began cold-calling farmers and said, “If you have surplus, we’ll come get it and bring it to the food bank.” They thought they’d move a million pounds and move on.
They moved a million pounds within weeks.
What they really learned in those first few months was that the problems they were seeing were not unique to COVID. We have a very vulnerable food system in this country. There’s so much food, yet it’s highly perishable, and there’s so much need, and there was really no intermediary coordinating the delivery of that surplus to those who need it.
It’s like a matching problem: how do you, within 24 hours, know what to do with a massive amount of fresh food?
As for saying yes, I was not looking for a job. I was at The Sill, which I founded and ran for over 12 years. But this was a really symbiotic adjacency: I’d worked with farmers, moved perishable products, created communities, and consumer brands. Here was an opportunity to take that skill set and apply it to something with an enormous impact on people’s lives. It was the combination of the opportunity’s size and the team’s solution-oriented earnestness that got me to say yes.
How do you take advantage of that very small window to get fresh produce to food banks?
It’s really about relationship building. Unless you have a massive, comprehensive rolodex of who needs what, it’s going to be impossible to make a match within the 24 to 48 hours you have.
We’ve spent the last six years developing relationships with food donors, but we also need deep relationships with food recipients—understanding their capacity. When can they take food? What kind of food do they take? What format does it need to be delivered in? How many volunteers do they have? How much cold storage do they have? With that information, if there’s a surplus of tomatoes, pears, or potatoes—or a rejected load at a grocery store or a port—we know who to call, and we can move that food very quickly.
The second piece is not just coordination, but actually paying for the transportation. Many donors are willing to give food for free, and the agencies that provide food to food-insecure families don’t have massive budgets—they can’t pay for shipping or logistics. So Farmlink focuses on two things: coordinating food recovery and covering transportation costs.
How do you cover the cost of transportation?
Farmlink is a nonprofit, and we are funded exclusively by donor dollars. Our donors include corporate partners, foundations, high-net-worth individuals, and individual consumers. You can visit our website and donate $5 per month to our cause. That money gets pooled to cover the overhead of our coordinating team and the transportation—and most of it is transportation, as you can imagine.
What statistic blew your mind about our food system when you first started considering joining Farmlink?
The magnitude is staggering. It takes roughly 10 billion pounds of food—give or take a few billion—to close the actual nutrition and meal gap for those facing food insecurity in this country. And there are approximately 30 billion pounds of surplus produce alone occurring pre-retail—before food even gets to a store or a restaurant.
There’s also waste happening across the entire supply chain. Four out of every 10 bags of groceries we bring home as Americans go right into the trash. But there’s such abundance happening specifically on the farm and leading up to retail, in what is arguably the most nutritious sector: produce.
You founded The Sill at 26. Now you’re leading a national nonprofit. What did 26-year-old Eliza think success would feel like, and how was she wrong?
Twenty-six-year-old me wanted to be doing something cool, special, and unique, which is probably about as profound as 26-year-olds are willing to think about their careers. I wanted to be engaged, I wanted to be learning, and I was a natural-born leader with an entrepreneurial spirit. I concluded that many entrepreneurs conclude that if I’m going to work this hard, I may as well work for myself. And if I’m working for myself, what do I feel passionately enough about to dedicate my time, energy, and attention to?
At 26, I was captivated by brand, marketing, and consumer experience. I loved the beautiful packaging and gorgeous photography. I didn’t want to just sell widgets.
As for how 26-year-old me was wrong about success—I think I defined it as accolades for The Sill. Now, at nearly 41, I feel like being where I am at Farmlink is actually how I register the success of the Sill. Success wasn’t a finite destination; it’s the fact that I’m now equipped to do this kind of work and have this kind of impact. Twenty-six-year-old me would not have known that.
What did your mom’s garden teach you that nobody else could have?
Time, patience, intuition, and failure. There are so many intrinsic life lessons in growing and caring for plants, because there’s a lot that’s out of your control and a lot that reveals itself over time.
My mother has been working her garden for as long as I’ve been alive. She’s originally from the Philippines and now lives in Western Massachusetts—about as far from the Philippines’ climate as you can imagine. Her gardening season is so short, but I think it’s what connects her to her heritage. For 40 years, she’s been working in that same garden. She’s constantly moving things around, trying new ideas, planting new rows, even though there’s not a ton of sun and the winters are harsh. Some things make it, some things don’t.
Having run The Sill for over a decade while watching her tend that garden, I’ve come to understand: some things just take time. Sometimes you just have to try, see what happens, fail, and adjust.
What did it feel like to hand the keys to The Sill over?
Honestly, it felt incredibly satisfying. I almost said relief—it wasn’t quite relief, but I feel very lucky to see the company and the brand continuing without me, still very aligned with my initial vision.
I don’t think many founders from my generation can say that. There are different ways to evaluate success as an entrepreneur—big financial outcomes, exits. Still, for me, it was about knowing that everything I worked on wasn’t a flash in the pan, that it would have a lasting impact.
I also knew I couldn’t be there forever. I had reached my own creative limit, and after navigating COVID, my whole life had changed. I started The Sill at 26, got married, had two kids, went through COVID, and raised nearly $25 million. I had done what I came to do. And it’s amazing how energized I feel now at Farmlink.
Where does power sit in the venture-backed world versus the nonprofit world, and what have you had to unlearn?
In the venture-backed world, power sits in the ownership pool.
As a founder-CEO, you’re constantly torn between meeting investor expectations and creating a great consumer experience. Sometimes those things align, and sometimes they don’t.
At Farmlink, the great unlearning is that I am simply a steward. No one owns this company. This organization needs to exist with or without me, with or without my board. We are here to steward the work and make good decisions on behalf of our mission—and we get to focus exclusively on that mission, without thinking about who’s making money off of it.
Government is retreating, SNAP is being cut, food banks are overwhelmed, and you’re being asked to be the safety net for the safety net. Are you mad—and at whom?
You could argue that we should all be mad, and I think there’s value in that. Anger can generate energy and collective mobilization. But we all know anger isn’t the most sustainable emotion.
We operate from an opportunity and problem-solving perspective. The landscape has shifted dramatically, and in an unfortunate direction. Can the hunger-fighting ecosystem pick up the slack? No—it was never intended for this. It was designed for emergency response, not as a baseline system to feed everyone in America all the time. And yet that’s increasingly the situation we’re in.
But here’s the flip side: this is the entrepreneur’s opportunity. How do you build creatively in a constrained environment? Constraint builds creativity. Yes, there are federal cuts to food assistance, inflation, and housing pressures—but we’re also living in an era of technological innovation. Farmlink is a fully remote, fully distributed organization. Even 10 years ago, we couldn’t have coordinated a team across New York, California, Colorado, and Texas the way we do now.
It also forces us to shift our priorities. We can’t exclusively focus on food recovery—we have to focus on advocacy, policy, and systems change. Moving more food tomorrow just means we’ll need to move more the day after. So I’m not mad. I’m cautiously optimistic.
How do you lead a spread-out team and keep spirits high as the conditions you’re working in keep changing?
Farmlink is at its own inflection point. We started as a grassroots, student-led organization—Zoom calls with 40 people, a flat structure, pure energy. As we’ve matured and scaled, we’ve brought in more professionalization: people with careers in finance, nonprofit management, and logistics. That’s changed the trajectory in positive ways, but it also challenges Farmlink’s cultural identity.
A lot of my job is twofold: continuing that professionalization and scale while upholding the founding DNA—the spirit, the speed, the hustle, the optimism, the earnestness.
I operate from a few hard-earned clichés: “you don’t have to do this, you get to do this.” And: “yes, it’s going to be hard—who said it was going to be easy?” That’s an idea I actually took from my mother, who is a career nurse. When I was raising money for The Sill and told her it was hard, she said, “You’re asking people for millions of dollars. You thought that was going to be easy?” She was always encouraging, always one step at a time.
I bring that levity and optimism into my leadership. We can’t take everything too seriously—we’re here to enjoy the work, too. And the Farmlink team is genuinely excited. Half of us are original founding members who can look back and say, “Look how far we’ve come.” Change is hard, yes, but this is a group that refused to let this problem persist the way it had.
How can Worth readers help?
My biggest takeaway for your readership is this: pick something to get involved in. It doesn’t have to be Farmlink or food security—it could be the arts, education, global hunger, water, anything.
A lot of people don’t know where to start, and feel so overwhelmed by the sheer volume of need in the world that they become stagnant. The whole world seems to be on fire, so where and how can one person make a difference?
My answer is: find your Venn diagram—the place where your interests and values intersect with a real need in the world—and focus there. Because if you do, you will see progress. It’s hard to see when you’re looking across every issue at once, but being at the ReFED Summit and hearing people talk about the progress made over the past ten years—if that had been your sole focus, you would feel very proud about how far the needle has moved.
Whether you roll up your sleeves or open your checkbook, both are genuinely needed. And the payoff is real—not just for the people being served, but for you. I’ve never felt as satisfied as I do doing this work.
