Located adjacent to Findlay Market, at the heart of Cincinnati’s emerging food scene, Our Daily Bread is Cincinnati’s largest soup kitchen. We serve 300 – 400 home-cooked meals, Monday through Friday, to our neighbors in need. In 2018 we served 133,000 meals – an impressive feat that seems incomprehensible when you consider that 100% of the food for these meals is donated, and the crux of this food is edible surplus food from the local food industry that would otherwise go to waste.

We are constantly in awe of Our Daily Bread Chef Garland and his ability to transform surplus food into nutritious meals.  We witness time after time as Garland turns rescued food into delicious recipes for 300+ people. This sparked an idea: What if we challenged local chefs to cook under the same conditions as Garland?

We reached out, and other people were excited by the idea too and SCRAPS Rescued Food Cook-Off was born. Two chefs battled it out toe-to-toe in a “chopped” style competition in front of a live audience at Our Daily Bread. They had 30 minutes to transform a mystery basked of items from our pantry into a dish. A brilliant panel of local celebrity judges then rated the food and declared a winner.

Meanwhile, at Rhinegeist 10 Chefs from 10 restaurants received mystery ingredients from a participating food sponsor a day in advance and threw-down to create “by-the-bite” creations.

The chefs donated their talent, our sponsors donated the food, compostable plates, napkins and utensils, and Rhinegeist provided staff, an amazing location and beer pairings to go with each by-the-bite. Our main goals were to celebrate the new culinary talent in our neighborhood while raising awareness and support for Our Daily Bread’s mission. We did just that.