Food For All Makes a Name Change to Reflect Growth

FALLS CHURCH, Va. — Food For All, the turnkey charitable-giving organization that has grown its services beyond hunger relief, is getting a new name to reflect that expansion.

As of Feb. 1, the organization will call itself “Making Change,” a reference both to its efforts to make improvements in local communities and to its checkstand-donation programs.

“We felt we needed a complete rebranding,” Denis Zegar, president of Food For All, told SN. “We do a lot of different programs not directly related to food, from Wounded Warriors to breast cancer. We needed something that could be an umbrella.”

The group is slated to unveil the name change at Food Marketing Institute’s Midwinter Executive Conference in Scottsdale, Ariz., this week, and to provide further information at the upcoming National Grocers Association conference in Las Vegas in February.

Food For All was founded in 1985 by a group of wholesaler executives under the name Food Industry Crusade Against Hunger, or FICAH, which was dedicated to providing solutions for hunger internationally. In 1997 FICAH merged with a local group called Food For All and later adopted that as its umbrella name.

Since its founding, Food For All has expanded the types of charities it supports to encompass health-related and other initiatives. It supports these efforts by providing turnkey, point-of-sale programs for retailers through which shoppers can select donation coupons in $1, $3 or $5 increments to add to their grocery checkout.

Proceeds are then distributed by the retailer to community-based, non-profit agencies, and a portion of the funds also supports Food For All’s international programs. Since 1985, Food For All has raised more than $76 million for charities in the U.S. and abroad.

The new name will make it easier for Food For All to continue expanding beyond hunger relief, and also to offer its services to businesses other than food retailers, Zegar explained.

“We think it will enable us to basically explore almost any charitable program without being held back by a previous mission statement, and also allows us to go outside the food industry,” he said. “We can go to the hotel industry as Making Change, for example, and talk about whatever programs they want to do. The name Food For All was limiting our ability to expand.”

Zegar said the food retail industry “will always remain the core” of the organization’s efforts, but it needs to expand its horizons.

“There are only so many grocery stores,” he explained. “We will never abandon the industry, but in the end it doesn’t matter if it is coming from a cash register in a Macy’s or in a Publix.”

To come up with the new branding, Food For All tapped Gyro, a global B-to-B marketing and advertising firm based in Cincinnati, which agreed to conduct a rebranding pro bono. Gyro, where Zegar’s son works, also does work for Kellogg Co., whose Dave Jones, vice president of industry initiatives, sits on Food For All’s board.

The new logo, featuring multiple colored circles of various sizes, is meant to reflect inclusion and diversity, while the increasing size of the circles, symbolizing coins, represents growth and giving.

The change was approved at the Grocery Manufacturers Association conference last fall, but Zegar said his group wanted to wait until after the holidays to launch it to the industry.

Food For All has also acquired the website makingchange.org.

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