Why this matters
Surplus food was always being given away here and there, whenever the right person happened to be in the room. Syd Mandelbaum's contribution was to remove the chance. He turned goodwill into a contractual obligation: a rider that requires a venue to release its uneaten food, every show, whether or not anyone thinks to ask. That single move is what made food recovery a system instead of a favor, and thirty-five years on, every operator doing this work on a film set is still building inside what he proved. The impulse was never rare. The mechanism was.
The record
- Founded
- 1991 informally (food recovery at Jones Beach Theatre); launched nationally 1994 via MTV
- Founders
- Syd Mandelbaum and Diane Mandelbaum
- Founder & CEO
- Syd Mandelbaum (still active, age 75)
- COO
- Diane Mandelbaum (co-founder; runs operations, finance, and fundraising)
- Type
- 501(c)(3) anti-poverty think tank
- Headquarters
- 405 Oceanpoint Ave, Cedarhurst, NY (Long Island)
- Impact
- Organization states 1 billion+ fed since 1991 (RWU's own framing); EPA documented 100M+ lbs to 200M+ people as of 2009
- Donor categories
- Touring bands, 70+ pro sports franchises, schools, hospitals, hospitality, TV/film including NBCUniversal
- Motivation
- To honor Mandelbaum's parents, Holocaust survivors
- Federal law
- Drafted language that became the basis of the Federal Food Donation Act of 2008
- Status
- Active
Syd Mandelbaum is a scientist by profession. He earned a BS and an MA from Brooklyn College and an MBA from Hofstra, served on the Lawrence school board and as a Nassau County Human Rights Commissioner, and built a career in DNA and genetics research. In 1994 he headed the American team that used DNA to disprove a claim to be the lost Grand Duchess Anastasia, described as the first use of DNA for a historical question. He later co-founded the DNA Shoah Project, which uses forensic DNA to reconnect families separated by the Holocaust, and in the early 1980s was among the first to videotape Holocaust survivor testimony. Rock and Wrap It Up! is the work he is best known for, and he and his wife Diane started it to honor his parents, both survivors. The specific spark was a June 1981 trip to Jerusalem with his father Joseph for the first World Gathering of Jewish Holocaust Survivors, after which, he has said, he felt he had to go home and change something.
It began with a phone call and a soup kitchen. In 1991 Mandelbaum was president of the Claddagh Inn soup kitchen in Rockaway Beach when the concert promoter Ron Delsener told him there was untouched food at the Jones Beach Theatre every summer and he was welcome to it. That first summer they recovered more than four thousand pounds. The insight that followed was logistical, not moral: the impulse to donate surplus food already existed everywhere, but it depended on the right person being in the room. A contractual mechanism could make it happen reliably, at every show, even when no one in the room thought to ask.
That mechanism became the contractual rider, and the organization launched nationally in 1994. The artists who signed first, among them Bruce Hornsby and the Range, the Rolling Stones, Aerosmith, Phish, and Michael Bolton, were not writing checks. They were signing contracts that obligated the venues to release prepared but unserved food at the end of each show. Goodwill was replaced with obligation. Over the following decades the model extended outward from music to professional sports, more than seventy franchises now, and to the hospitality industry, schools, hospitals, and film and television productions, with NBCUniversal among the named entertainment partners. The organization's film and television work runs under Project: It's a Wrap!, which began in 1997, the first film being The Devil's Own.
How much the model has recovered is harder to state cleanly than the organization's headline suggests. Rock and Wrap It Up! says it has fed more than a billion people since 1991, a figure it frames inconsistently across its own materials as people, meals, and pounds. The most recent independently documented numbers are the Environmental Protection Agency's, which in 2009 credited the organization with more than a hundred million pounds of food delivered to more than two hundred million people across five hundred cities, run by roughly six employees on a budget under half a million dollars a year. The Whole Earth Calculator, launched with the NFL at the 2014 Super Bowl, converts pounds of food diverted into meals served and greenhouse gas emissions avoided in a single calculation. Mandelbaum, now in his seventies, is still CEO. He was photographed in 2020 personally unloading food at a Long Island community center during the worst of the COVID year. His reach went past the loading dock and into the law: the language he drafted, working with Representative Jo Ann Emerson and Senator Chuck Schumer, became the basis of the Federal Food Donation Act of 2008, which pushed the federal government to give away its own surplus food rather than trash it.
The lineage shows up on film sets directly. Earth Angel, Emellie O'Brien's sustainability company, partnered with Rock and Wrap It Up! on the set of Annie in 2014, redistributing thousands of pounds of catering food through the model Mandelbaum had spent two decades building. In Los Angeles today, EcoSet channels craft services and catering food through Every Day Action, a separate operation reaching the same end by the same logic. The organizations are not linked, but the instinct is one and the same: build the mechanism, and the food finds the people who need it.
"I came up with something called contractual obligation, which is still used today. We thought that a band's management could put a stipulation in their rider, saying that all edible leftover food, prepared but not served, cannot go into a landfill. It must feed the hungry."
Syd Mandelbaum, Founder and CEO, Rock and Wrap It Up!, MUSE (Members United for Sustainable Events), 2022