Food Waste Focus

There are two free Internet sites which help U.S. foodservice operators find commercial composting facilities near them. BioCycle Magazine’s online database, located on the web at www.findacomposter.com.  The site — which was recently redesigned — offers a searchable database of companies which process organic waste.  Unfortunately, not all composters choose to list themselves so the [...]

Practice Greenhealth recently released a 10-Step Guide to Foodservice Composting.  Although it was written specifically with healthcare foodservice in mind, all the content should be generally applicable to most volume foodservice operations. Download Practice Greenhealth Guide here: Composting 10StepGuide Practice Greenhealth offers many other excellent resources on waste management. Visit their site at www.practicegreenhealth.org.

How do you know that you’re focusing on the right waste management priorities? Want to be greener and wondering how to get there? Can’t afford to lose any time and need the biggest win for limited dollars? To answer these questions, you don’t need to start from scratch. Operators should check out a new class [...]

Soon after you start tracking food waste you run into a question about units of measure.  Do I want to track weight, servings, each/count, or volume.  The answer is to track waste in the form that makes the most sense for that item and then convert it to a common metric for comparison purposes.  For [...]

We recently ran across an article in Healthcare Design magazine titled: “Where does your facility fall on the greening spectrum?” Although this article focused on healthcare (regulated medical waste, preferred purchasing, etc.), they spoke about a Practice Greenhealth study and their efforts to break ‘greening’ down into specific categories.  By doing this it helps the [...]

On February 9th, First Lady Michelle Obama announced an online Food Environment Atlas. The map is a collaboration between the USDA Economic Research Service, the Agricultural Marketing Service and the Food and Nutrition Service to share data resources. The map is also designed to include geographic coordinates for farmer’s market locations and farmers markets/farm stands [...]

We ran across this cool calculator today and wanted to pass it along.  Originally intended for K-12 school foodservice, it can be applied to most other foodservice groups (hospitals, university, corporate dining) with a little adjustment. The Oklahoma Department of Agriculture created this produce calculator so that when a foodservice director  says, “I need enough [...]

New York City – the Big Apple…wasting apples?  Is this true?  No.  But it’s an excellent video demonstrating the huge amount of food waste generated.  Check it out:  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2V5fKX_U3qY&feature=player_embedded Sometimes it takes an example like this to help everyone get a grasp on the true volume of food waste.  A single item, filling up a [...]

Foodservice operators are looking for ways to avoid landfilling disposable items such as drinking cups, plates, and to-go containers. The best solution is to reuse service ware – convert from disposables to durables.  But this is not be possible in many scenarios. The alternative is to buy environmentally preferable disposables, but this can be tricky.  [...]

What is “Food Rescue”? Food Rescue: the practice of safely retrieving edible food that would otherwise go to waste and distributing it to those in need. Why is this important? 90% of low-income households with at least one child under the age of 12 use food pantries and soup kitchens and also participate in the [...]