Summarize this content to 2000 words in 6 paragraphs In perhaps their highest-profile collaboration to date, Farmlink recently partnered with Erewhon, the city’s premier luxury grocery store also known for its celebrity smoothie partnerships. During the first week of April, shoppers could choose to round up to the next dollar, all proceeds going to Farmlink. While every dollar earned allowed the organization to rescue 46 lbs. of food, Collier didn’t see the Erewhon collaboration as much of a fundraising attempt, but rather a valuable chance to make themselves known to Los Angeles’s influential denizens.“I don’t think the amount of dollars that Erewhon raises for this will be headline-worthy. I think that the effort to use their influence over communities to create more space to amplify impactful work like Farmlink’s is a really great thing to promote and encourage,” he says. “Erewhon is in front of such an important audience—the type of people that are shopping at Erewhon have the influence to create social shifts in perspective.”One aspect of food insecurity that Collier is trying to combat is the social stigma surrounding it. “Whether you buy a bottle of water or drink for free from a water fountain, neither experience is more dignified than the other, but with food, it’s a completely different conversation,” he says. “Fifty percent of people that are food insecure, and know where their local food bank is, will still not go, because there’s such a stigma associated with that.” Collier is hopeful that partnering with such a high-profile (and high price tag) grocer will also help shift attitudes around food insecurity. “I think that partnerships like Erewhon, [who] are lending their platform to Farmlink, that’s how we’re gonna make the most progress and normalizing this work and helping people understand the nuance within our food system,” he says.Erewhon isn’t the only major player who’s taken notice of Farmlink’s efforts. The nonprofit has gotten a helping hand from the likes of Metallica, self-help author Tony Robbins, and Chipotle. Collier credits the attention they’ve received to their feel-good origin story: a group of college kids who, as the world shut down, sprung into action.Collier recalls reading a story in the New York Times about an onion farmer stuck with 2 million pounds of onions. “He said, ‘If you got a truck here, you can take whatever you can.’ We pulled together $900 and that was enough to pay a truck driver to go pick up 40,000 pounds of onions and bring them back to a local food bank. The next day, we had to have our co-founders, James [Kanoff] and Aidan [Reilly] rent a U-Haul and pick up 11,000 eggs from a farmer near them and drive back down the 405 and drop those off at a food bank in Santa Monica,” he says. “And that was the start.”
