A local organization is delivering about 33 tons of surplus food a month from area restaurants and grocery stores to hungry residents in the Austin area, its executive director said.

Keep Austin Fed, a volunteer-based nonprofit, obtains nutritious surplus food from commercial kitchens and distributes it to area charities.

With organic-diversion measures of the city’s universal recycling ordinance going into effect in 2018, the organization is gearing up for growth, Executive Director Susan Nahkunst said.

“We are getting constant calls now,” Nahkunst said, referring to businesses preparing for the ordinance. “We had a growth spurt in 2013; we are getting ready to do another one. We have to make sure we are on the spot.”

KAF was founded by Randy Rosens and Ira Kaplan, who discovered they were individually salvaging leftovers from area food establishments and delivering it to those in need. Nahkunst got involved in fall 2012. Her late husband was in the restaurant business, so she was “highly aware” of the need to keep leftover food out of the waste stream, she said.

She said the organization works with about 35 food establishments to distribute their surplus food. KAF’s volunteers, which total about 60, make regular pickups from those locations, such as Trader Joe’s.

Nahkunst said the organization makes smaller drop-off runs that are not cost-effective to the area food banks. She said the organization is working on perfecting its logistics to make the process more efficient and deliver food to even more clients.

“[Delivering surplus food to the hungry] just makes such a difference,” Nahkunst said. “It’s an incredible feeling when people are in tears because they haven’t been able to buy milk. It’s absolutely overwhelming and very touching.”

But the organization is not limiting itself to Austin. KAF is planning to expand to operate in other U.S. cities, she said.

“We have a pilot program,” she said, referring to its Austin operations. “We have a model that is scalable to where it’ll work in multiple cities.”

The organization will have to tweak its formula according to each respective jurisdiction’s laws and is planning for the eventuality of a nationwide presence by building its infrastructure, she said.