The battle against hunger is no longer confined to traditional realms like food banks and religious organizations. In the Bay Area, more activists and local governments are trying to find new and more ambitious solutions to the quiet epidemic plaguing one of the country’s richest regions.

This movement has been sparked by newfound urgency to address food waste, as well as understanding how food banks can best serve their clients. Many organizations are trying to unlock the full potential of tech company cafeterias and college dining halls with innovative ideas, such as designing special food trucks that may be able to more efficiently feed the hungry where they live.

“There’s this old model for feeding people who are food-insecure, which is the church basement handing people a bag,” said Sara Webber, founder of the Berkeley Food Network, a new food hub that brings together 40 different city agencies that work with the poor. “I could see that just wasn’t an effective model anymore.”

About 870,000 people in the Bay Area are food-insecure, meaning that there are as many people as the entire population of San Francisco who do not always know the source of their next meal. Most are working families and senior citizens who are struggling to eat in the region due to a variety of factors. These issues are explored in-depth in a special report in Sunday’s Chronicle Food + Home section.

At the same time, mountains of leftover meals are generated at colleges, banquets and, perhaps most prominently, tech companies — the same industry that is often blamed for the region’s affordability crisis. More and more, local governments and nonprofits are working to harness these untapped resources, and by doing so, trying to get more food to the needy.

When researching how to reduce its solid waste to comply with state law, Santa Clara County discovered it had 34 million pounds of edible food going into landfills every year. That’s despite the fact that almost 720,000 people are food-insecure in Santa Clara and San Mateo counties, according to Second Harvest Food Bank, which serves the two counties.

“A lot of the food waste was related to the fact that there weren’t systems or infrastructures set up to be able to deliver that food,” said Roger Ross of Santa Clara County’s Consumer and Environmental Protection Agency. “And so we saw right away that we could bridge that supply and make a better use for it than going to compost and get it to people who need it.”

That was the impetus of the county granting $280,000 to the philanthropic organization Joint Venture Silicon Valley, later matched with $300,000 from the state and $150,000 from the family of Silicon Valley real estate developer John Sobrato, for an initiative called Silicon Valley Food Rescue. Part of that is a new program that transports nutritious meals left over from dining halls to low-income neighborhoods in Santa Clara and San Mateo counties.

The experiment is in a trial phase with Stanford University dining halls. There, workers put leftover food into family-size meal containers, and then a driver transports the meals in a custom-designed, refrigerated Ford Transit van. Neighbors can walk up to a window and pick up a meal on the day it was prepared.

The plan is that the program will eventually pick up excess meals from tech company cafeterias. “It’s so unique to Silicon Valley to have these huge quantities of prepared food that gets wasted every day,” said Robin Franz Martin, executive director of Silicon Valley Food Rescue. “There are groups of adults all over the county, at tech companies and universities, that are being fed on a large scale like nowhere else on Earth.”

Anywhere that guests are fed on a buffet line — whether it’s a corporate cafeteria, university or hotel banquet hall — the food staff is generally trained to keep platters full and to provide abundant options.

Many tech companies and corporate caterers already have plans in place to deal with what so often gets left over within that system. Zynga, which serves its employees and office tenants in San Francisco about 400 breakfasts and 700 to 800 lunches every day, donates 500 servings of food per week. The nonprofit organization Food Runners picks up its trays of leftovers, like mac-and-cheese and salads — only what hasn’t yet been put out on the buffet yet — and delivers them to shelters and soup kitchens.

On a larger scale, Bon Appetit Management Co. runs cafeterias for 40 Bay Area companies, including Airbnb, Uber and Twitter. Its Bay Area kitchens have donated the equivalent of more than 114,000 meals this year through Chefs to End Hunger.

That program is run by the restaurant produce wholesaler LA & SF Specialty. Kitchens can arrange to have donated meals picked up at the same time they receive produce orders. The meals then get delivered to Hope to Heart, a nonprofit in Alameda County.

These forward-thinking programs are notable because they bypass the main local source of food for the hungry: regional food banks.

In the Bay Area, food banks have reached a tipping point. Funded mostly by private and corporate donations with some federal funding, food banks purchase and receive donations of enormous amounts of food that they store in warehouses before they’re distributed to smaller food pantries and agencies that provide the food to their clients. To meet increased need, the San Francisco-Marin Food Bank recently opened a new warehouse in Marin, yet the San Francisco warehouse is still at capacity.

Local solutions to the hunger problem are also needed because federal programs like the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, commonly known as food stamps, do not help everyone in the Bay Area because high minimum wages often disqualify people from SNAP assistance, despite leaving some of them still unable to afford enough food.

Because the usual programs — including food pantries that serve families with children — are strained in San Francisco, the Food Security Task Force in the Department of Public Health makes recommendations for city-funded hunger relief initiatives.

“Our food safety net infrastructure is really at capacity,” said Paula Jones, director of food security in San Francisco, while presenting the findings of a upcoming Food Security Task Force report to the city’s Health Commission. Jones noted that both public and private home-delivered food programs that assist seniors and adults with disabilities, such as Meals on Wheels, have waiting lists. That’s even though the city increased funding of such programs from $15 million in the 2015-16 fiscal year to more than $20 million in the 2017-18 fiscal year.

Another big challenge is finding ways to increase the efficiency of existing resources. In Berkeley, about 40 agencies individually get food for their clients from the Alameda County Community Food Bank, said Webber of the new Berkeley Food Network. Most have to send staff or volunteers in personal cars to the warehouse near the Oakland airport, and many don’t have room in their facilities for storage, she added. It’s a system that’s inefficient and piecemeal.

That’s why the Berkeley Food Network is in negotiations to lease a warehouse in West Berkeley that will store food bank supplies for organizations such as the Berkeley PTA, which runs food pantries at public schools.

In addition, it will also have kitchen space to receive rescued, prepared food that needs to be portioned into individual servings, because many smaller organizations lack the facilities to do that.

The hub will also host a food pantry six days a week for people who can’t attend other pantries, Webber said, such as a single mother she met who had a hard time finding a pantry with hours that don’t conflict with her work schedule.

“There are so many people who are hungry who just don’t have the time or the ability to get to these places,” she said. “Seniors who can’t carry a bag a long way, or working families who don’t have the time. We want to reach people where they need us.”

Tara Duggan is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer. Email: tduggan@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @taraduggan