How Community Fridges Help Feed America | Freedges Brian Vines Consumer Reports has no financial relationship with advertisers on this site. When you ask Jim Nanni a question about refrigerators, get ready for a major data download. As director of appliance testing at Consumer Reports, Nanni has tested thousands of refrigerators—French-door, top-freezer, side-by-side, you name it. He can reel off stats regarding cubic-foot capacities and energy ratings. So when the man hears about a type of refrigerator that’s new to him, that’s notable. The term that sent him to the search engine: community fridge. A community fridge is an ordinary refrigerator like the many Nanni has tested, but it’s not installed in somebody’s kitchen. Rather, it is kept somewhere where the public can readily access it, often just out on the sidewalk or near a popular restaurant or store, and stocked by organized community groups or sometimes by individual volunteers with fresh food, produce, and frozen items for anyone to take, without limit and free of charge. Some have taken to calling them "freedges."