It was a devastating hurricane in Honduras that first sparked Richard Proudfit's war on hunger.
The engineer-turned-entrepreneur traveled to Central America as part of Hurricane Fifi's medical relief team in 1974 to help repair the country's infrastructure. Witnessing the survivors' misery altered his life's mission.
"I saw thousands of children dying all around me," Proudfit later recalled. "I couldn't handle it. I had to do something when I got back to Minnesota."
Thirteen years later, he founded Feed My Starving Children, a Christian-based nonprofit that packages nutritious meals for millions of malnourished children around the world. That operation — and eventually his second nonprofit, Kids Against Hunger — delivered a combined 1 billion meals a year.
The Twin Cities philanthropist whose battle against hunger took him to war zones across the globe where he risked his life to bring food to the starving, died Tuesday at age 88.
"He planted the seeds for thousands upon thousands of children to be fed when he answered God's call to 'Feed my starving children,' " said current CEO Mark Crea. "We are honored to continue following this call 31 years later."
Proudfit's mission first launched in 1987, when he assembled scientists from General Mills, Cargill and other companies to create a food product that provided all the nutritional requirements to sustain the famished. The group settled on a winning formula: a mix of rice, soy, dehydrated vegetables and chicken flavoring — plus vitamins and minerals — that is still used today.
And so the Coon Rapids-based Feed My Starving Children was born. But with the United Nations reporting more than 800 million people in a state of chronic hunger, Proudfit wanted to spread that packaging model across the nation to feed even more. So in 1999, he left his first organization to create Kids Against Hunger.
