More than 100 million meals delivered annually across over 40 states at a cost of just one penny per meal—those are the numbers behind HATCH for Hunger, an Indiana-born nonprofit connecting protein producers, food banks, and donors to help close the nation’s charitable protein gap.
Speaking at the Indiana Hunger Summit in Indianapolis, Elanco Animal Health CEO and HATCH board chairman Jeff Simmons recalled the moment the idea took root over a decade ago when his wife returned from volunteering at a local care center.
“Outside of diapers, Jeff, it’s kind of sad, the hardest thing to get is protein,” Simmons remembered her saying.
Shortly after, a conversation with Bob Krouse of MPS Egg Farms revealed the producer side of the equation. Simmons pointed to medium eggs, which represent roughly 5% of total egg production. While grocery shoppers consistently reach for large eggs and commercial breakers handle smalls, medium eggs often sit in an awkward, low-demand limbo that left producers with excess supply they struggled even to give away.
“Bob and I are sitting, and he goes, ‘Nobody wants eggs. I try to donate them, and nobody wants them,’” Simmons said.
The issue was not a lack of generosity, but an unpredictable supply chain. Food banks often lacked the cold storage or logistical structure to handle irregular donations, while farmers could not absorb the costs of sporadic dumping. To solve both sides of the problem, HATCH created a sustainable, cost-plus purchasing model that covers farm production costs on underutilized protein while supplying hunger relief networks at dependable, affordable rates.
Under the operational leadership of CEO Danny Leckie, HATCH scaled from three employees and a single delivery truck into a nationwide network.
“We’re not your grandfather’s nonprofit,” Leckie said, noting that organizations relying exclusively on free donations cannot secure consistent access. “If we wanted to expand our impact, and our footprint, and create more consistent access and more value, we had to buy.”
What began with medium eggs has expanded across the livestock sector to include chicken, turkey, beef, pork, and cheese, with processors like Tyson Foods stepping in to package protein specifically for food bank distribution. Through its Coalition to Close the Protein Gap, HATCH is now tackling an estimated 800-million-pound annual protein shortfall across America’s charitable food system.
“My hope is, five years from now, that gap is closing, and it’s sustainable,” Simmons said. “We’re going to show one of the nation’s best nonprofit hunger models without donations, but in a sustainable, shared-value way where everybody in the chain makes a little bit. For the rest of the decade, it’s three billion more meals every year on a sustainable basis. That’s what Indiana can create together in this room.”
More information on the initiative is available at hatchforhunger.com.
