Sauce MKE Delivers Food by Bike

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Sauce MKE is a nonprofit organization with the goal of bringing fresh, nutritious food via bicycle to communities across Milwaukee. Gianni Vaccaro started the organization in 2021 in order to help those experiencing food scarcity in the city, using a bike in order to keep her environmental footprint to a minimum. Produce is picked and plant-based meals are made from gardens and then delivered to folks in need; Vaccaro takes donations as well, operating under the principle that no food should go to waste.

She was inspired to start Sauce after being invited to go dumpster diving one day. “There’s a man who runs an organization called Bicycle Benefits that motivates people to bike to places instead of driving. He took me to Sendik’s, and in that dumpster were hundreds of pounds of perfectly acceptable food. I was really disturbed by that.”

“I worked at a school called Siefert Elementary through the Boys & Girls Club of Greater Milwaukee, and a lot of children would eat breakfast, lunch and dinner with us. Many of them did not eat very well at home; when schools were closed, there weren’t lunch programs and that really affected them. I saw children get really excited for fruits and vegetables in a way that I’d never seen from kids; like, there’d be five year olds that were so stoked about salads.”

After those experiences, Vaccaro pursued a 501c3. She named it “Sauce MKE” because she believes sauce is the best part about food. “Any food that’s not super delicious can often be made better with sauce,” she said. “I love cooking different kinds of sauce; my dad is Sicilian, and we made lots of tomato sauce every year. When I first started Sauce, one of the main things I ran around was pasta dishes.”

Victory Garden

Sauce does several runs in springtime where they go around distributing sprouts and pots so that folks can start their own gardens. In the summertime they cultivate a wide range of produce including tomatoes, leafy greens, berries, eggplant, corn, melons, herbs, carrots, onions, peppers, beets and potatoes; they have friends who let them harvest apples, peaches and pears as well. Full meals are often prepared in order to make food as accessible as possible to folks. “I have my own garden at my home in Riverwest and then we have a few plots at the Victory Garden Initiative,” Vaccaro explains. “We do a couple meetups a year where people can come to our garden and learn how to tend one properly.”

In wintertime they do meal sign ups where folks can request food deliveries to their houses. Vaccaro continues, “Around November we put up flyers where people can call us, or they can sign up on our website.”

Routes for giving out food are planned using a map developed by students at UW-Madison that details what areas of Milwaukee struggle with the most food scarcity. Sauce originally went simply from area to area. Soon, however, they would focus on food scarcity within aldermanic districts so that it would be easier to collect data and apply for grants. “What we would do to make it more feasible is to go by 10 block by 10 block radiuses,” Vaccaro said. “The areas where what we’re doing is necessary, it gets received very well.”

Ability to Communicate

Vaccaro does much of the work herself although she has enlisted several trusted volunteers to help her. When it comes to those interested in volunteering, there’s some crucial things she needs folks to understand first, saying, “You have to be able to bike for a long time and you have to be equipped to witness things that you might not be used to in your neighborhood. Milwaukee is so incredibly segregated that there are cultural and racial gaps of understanding, and you have to be OK with the discomfort of going into places that you’ve never been. If you want to volunteer then I’m looking for a deep understanding of socialization and the ability to communicate with everyone openly. I’m also still getting equipped to give volunteers the proper training so that we can build trust between each other and with our communities.”

A block party in Riverwest that Sauce threw last summer featured free food, live music, local artists, cultural dances, mutual aid resources and bike repair. Vaccaro recalls, “It was a huge learning experience for me and this year I plan to make it so much better. It’ll be the same type of thing but with more vendors and more seating. It’s a party that everyone’s invited to and I’m super excited.”

On the biggest things she’s learned from running the organization, Vaccaro shares, “I’ve learned how much I don’t know about Milwaukee. We are lucky to be in Milwaukee for many reasons; we have access to the largest source of freshwater in the world, we can grow food, and we have manageable seasons. I think a lot of us could really work together, and all we have to do is start.”

Sauce MKE’s block party returns on July 2. Long term goals they have are to move their operations into a building, set up “Sauce” boxes to give out from participating local businesses, and to open a hybrid cafe and bike shop that will be entirely free. In the meantime, they are always accepting food donations. Visit their website at saucemilwaukee.org for more info. Donate to their GoFundMe at gofundme.com/f/sauce-milwaukee-startup.