Join food donors, nonprofit partners, food runner volunteers, and other food recovery champions for refreshments, conversation, and a chance to celebrate your impact and share your experiences. During the Happy Hour, we will be specially recognizing food runners, the invaluable volunteers who pick up good food that would otherwise go to the landfill, and drive the food to be donated to those most in need. We will also host County officials, agencies, and decision-makers, in order to make connections and raise awareness about preventing food waste.

Youth-Led Voices on Post-Harvest and Value Addition Entrepreneurship is a youth-focused event that brings together young farmers, entrepreneurs, innovators, and stakeholders to discuss opportunities, challenges, and practical solutions in post-harvest management and agricultural value addition. The event aims to amplify youth perspectives, share success stories, promote innovation, and encourage sustainable agribusiness practices that reduce post-harvest losses, create jobs, and increase income across agricultural value chains.

The Maryland Department of the Environment (MDE) is excited to announce Maryland’s Food Summit 2026: “Everyone at the Table: Participate. Connect. Nourish. Create.” This highly interactive, in-person summit brings together partners from across Maryland and the region to workshop hands-on solutions for food rescue (food recovery and legal protections), composting, school programs (share tables and gardens), cold storage, waste reduction (reuse), and more. This event is in support of the National Food Waste Prevention Week, and is a community, environment and climate action building on previous Maryland Food Summits, Maryland Food Residual Diversion law, Maryland Food System Resiliency Council and Maryland’s Solid Waste Infrastructure for Recycling workplan.

Chef will demo full utilization of veggies to make a couple delicious sauces and garnish for flatbreads), and then making some flatbreads in the demo.