“86” Food Waste

Find out why keeping food out of landfills has become a serious commitment for operators, and they’re sharing their efforts with consumers.

TREND 7: GREEN OPERATIONS

“86” Food Waste

As social consciousness grows, operators and consumers are becoming more concerned about the staggering amount of food that goes to waste.

AMERICA DOESN’T EAT 40% OF ITS FOOD

The National Resources Defense Council puts it this way: “If the United States went grocery shopping, we would leave the store with five bags and leave two in the parking lot. All told, America throws out more than 1,250 calories per day per person, or more than 400 pounds of food per person annually.”¹

According to Technomic, the country wastes approximately 63 million tons of food annually, at a cost of more than $218 billion. Twenty-five percent (16 million tons) of the total food waste is generated by the foodservice business alone, at the cost of $36.5 billion.² The staggering environmental, societal, and economic impact of that is gaining attention across the food chain.

41% of college students believe waste reduction is a top initiative food operators should be implementing.³

Operators are doing all kinds of things to both reduce the impact and call attention to the problem, from putting smaller plates at salad bars and serving carrots with carrot-top pesto, to working with local farms to turn waste into animal feed and compost.

Skidmore College eschews trayless dining and preplates meals instead, and conducts food-waste audits early in the fall semester to heighten awareness among the freshman class
Marriott International has made a global commitment to reduce food waste by 50% by 2025, introducing a Hotel Kitchen Toolkit that provides the background, tools, and resources a property of any size needs to prevent, donate, or divert potential food waste

Dig Inn Seasonal Market touts its custom “Better OJ,” a blend of orange, carrot, and mint juice that uses sustainable, recovered produce
Google has kept more than six million pounds of food waste from its cafés out of landfills with projects like using broccoli stems to make pesto and using overripe bananas in crepes or banana bread
Manufacturers are stepping up with efforts like producing flour from coffee cherries (the fruit around the bean, which is normally thrown out) and upcycling avocado pits into biodegradable straws and disposable cutlery

Equinox Restaurant hosted a popular multi-course #NotWasted Culinary Arts Experience & Earth Day Dinner highlighted by a menu that turned food scraps into such items as Boston lettuce stem salad with strawberry hull pesto and wilted radicchio, and Burmese tofu fried with purée of shiitake mushroom stems

Driven largely by cost savings, nearly all operators (96%) consider food-waste reduction to be important to their businesses.²

Zero Waste is in the Inception Stage or earliest phase of development, appearing in fine-dining venues.⁴

Resources

The Environmental Protection Agency makes available an Excel-based Food and Packaging Waste Prevention Tool, in addition to many other resources
The ReFED site includes the Roadmap to Reduce U.S. Food Waste, a first-of-its-kind economic analysis which has identified 27 opportunities for food-waste reduction
The Green Restaurant Association helps restaurants, manufacturers, and suppliers tackle a variety of sustainability issues, including food waste. There is also a certification program
Solutions provided by Leanpath use technology to weigh and track waste, analyze the financial and environmental impact, and provide actionable insights
The Food Waste Reduction Alliance is an initiative of the Grocery Manufacturers Association (representing food and beverage companies), the Food Marketing Institute (food retailers), and the National Restaurant Association (foodservice)
The recipes on One Green Planet include such creative uses for vegetable trimmings as Carrot Avocado Ginger Soup and Roasted Buffalo Cauliflower Bites
The stated mission of The Food Recovery Network: unite students at colleges and universities to fight food waste and hunger by recovering perishable food that would otherwise go to waste from their campus dining halls and donating it to those in need

^{Sources: [1] Natural Resources Defense Council, 2017. [2] Technomic, “The Benefits of Waste Reduction and How to Achieve Them” (2019). [3] Technomic Ignite, Noncommercial (May 2019). [4] Datassential Menu Adoption Cycle, Macro Trends (2019).}