Toast launches second End Summer Hunger campaign with No Kid Hungry

Toast launched its second End Summer Hunger campaign on June 24, pairing a $50,000 fundraising match through Toast.org with a $5 donation for each restaurant referral submitted from June 1 through Aug. 31, up to $25,000. The restaurant technology company is also leaning on employee volunteer and donation efforts in Australia, Canada, India and Ireland, with named partners Eat Up, After the Bell, Akshaya Patra and The Good Grub.

The timing matters because Toast and No Kid Hungry are aiming straight at the summer hunger gap. Toast says 1 in 5 children in the United States faces hunger, and it is framing the campaign around the loss of school-year meals when classes end. No Kid Hungry’s summer meals work is built around the same problem: before newer programs, only 2.8 million children were accessing summer meals, and Summer EBT reached more than 18 million children in 2024, its first year. Even with that progress, the group estimates 13 million more children are needed to reach full implementation of the summer-meals goal.

The campaign sits inside a larger federal and nonprofit response. USDA’s summer nutrition programs include the Summer Food Service Program and the Seamless Summer Option, and Summer EBT, also called SUN Bucks, began in summer 2024. No Kid Hungry says free summer meals are available to children and teenagers 18 years old or younger at approved sites, with some children with disabilities over 18 also eligible in certain settings. The group also points out that rural communities often need grab-and-go, home delivery and parent-pickup models to make summer access work.

Inside Toast, Kelly Esten, the company’s chief marketing officer and chief operating officer of enterprise, is leading the campaign. Toast is treating employees, partners, customers and guests as separate channels in the same push, a structure that makes the effort more repeatable than a one-off donation drive. Aman Narang, Toast’s chief executive and co-founder, was an early signatory to No Kid Hungry’s CEO Pledge to End Summer Hunger, which launched in 2024 with a goal of expanding summer meals reach from 2.8 million to 30 million children. No Kid Hungry says 41% of parents struggle in some way to provide food when children are out of school, and 74% of rural low-income families ran out of food in the summer before they had money to buy more.

For A Simple Gesture, the campaign works as a workplace-engagement case study because it combines a public-facing cause with internal participation and a measurable trigger. That is the same logic behind green bag pickups, pantry partnerships and volunteer recruitment at a neighborhood food-recovery nonprofit: give people a simple action, build a routine around it and make the reach visible. A Simple Gesture was started by Jonathan Trivers in Paradise, California, where the organization says more than 1,700 food donors help collect over 132,000 pounds of food each year across a community of about 35,000 residents and 14,000 households.