Most of us live or work in an area that has some sort of food bank, soup kitchen or food recovery service.  But are we using them?  Do they want the kind of food we have in surplus?  Do we even have enough food to donate?  Are we concerned about food safety and liability?  Click on the link “food donation” to get answers and learn more about what you can do in your area.  This link will answer your questions about:  tax benefits for donating, information about food safety and protection from liability, even the typical types of food donated.  There are also several links to help you find a food bank or recovery site in your area.

Imagine if all food operations in one small town donated all surplus food to their local food bank.  How much food would that be?  How many hungry would they feed?

Here’s an example:  Disney.  It’s a theme park but made to look like a small town with shops, restaurants and hotels.  This ‘small town’ is really making a difference in their food donation efforts.  The Disney Harvest Food Program collects food that has been prepared and not served, donating almost 50,000 pounds of edible food each month!

Let’s all work on source reduction and feeding hungry people.  We can make a huge impact with those two goals.

We mention these holidays, because they are fun (of course!), but also because incorporating these dates into your menu can help to reduce food waste by finding a ‘planned reuse’ opportunity.  Plan ahead, freeze/store the overproduced items or trim, then use them on the designated holiday.  If you like a particular holiday – celebrate it more often, quarterly or even monthly.

For example:
April

National Bake Week Begins First Monday – Use any leftover items to make creative new products.   For example:

April 7: Coffee Cake Day – play with your usual recipe for coffee cake.  Use granola for topping, add nuts, chocolate chips, sliced fruit. Maybe you can sell a slice of Coffee Cake with cup of coffee – at a special discount price for both?

April 11: National Cheese Fondue Day – This one might require a little effort in the weeks before.  Collect and use all the end pieces of cheese – from the deli, grill, catering or other stations.  Melt and combine with herbs and a little bit of flour for a classic fondue.  For the ‘dippers’ – use day old bread or bagels cut into cubes, bagel chips, pretzel pieces, and vegetable sticks.  The fondue and dippers can be sold as one item, separately or by the pound.   Sell fondue in ounce cups with lids.

May

National Barbeque Month – This has endless possibilities be creative.  Here are just a few:

Coffee Rub for Barbeque

We found this recipe as well as many other by just searching for “Coffee BBQ” on the internet.  NOTE: You will need to adjust the quantity and proportions to fit the usual foodservice volume. This recipe comes from:  http://www.ineedcoffee.com/07/coffee-bbq/

Mix all ingredients well and apply generously to most cuts of pork. Pat into meat well before grilling or smoking. We like to use it on baby backs or pork spareribs. This rub also works for pork loin and pork chops on the grill.

Remember the recipe above is a guideline. Don’t be afraid to experiment with other ingredients like rosemary, ginger, cinnamon, or nutmeg. Get Creative!

You see them sometimes on your calendar, or maybe on the local news: National Chocolate Day!  Chile Pepper Festival Day!  Are these holidays real?  When are they?  Yes – they are real and it seems that there is a ‘food’ holiday for almost every day of the year.  A quick search on the internet will reveal a handful of sites.  Check out sites like:  http://www.tfdutch.com/foodh.htm or http://www.foodreference.com/html/historicevents.html

We mention these holidays, because they are fun (of course!), but also because incorporating these dates into your menu can help to reduce food waste by finding a ‘planned reuse’ opportunity.  Plan ahead, freeze/store the overproduced items or trim, then use them on the designated holiday.  If you like a particular holiday – celebrate it more often, quarterly or even monthly.

For example:

National Clam Chowder Day, February 25th – Reuse?  A great way to use up leftover cream, 1/2-n-1/2, or milk from coffee bars or catering services.  Another reuse?  Serve a Vegetable Chowder and use any overproduced/unused vegetables from the entree station – peas, carrots, potatoes.

National Fruit Compote Day, March 1st – Reuse?  Still edible fruit that has a small cosmetic bruise.  Compote can be made in advance and refrigerated or frozen for quite a while.  Make sure it is date stamped and used within the proper amount of time.  Use as a topping or in cobbler and bread pudding.  Fruit compote can even be sold in a separate container – think $5 for a quart of Apple or Pear Pie Filling around the holidays.

National Banana Crème Pie Day, March 2nd – Reuse?  Everybody has those sad, spotty bananas leftover each week.  Sometimes they are used for smoothies, but what about a fabulous Banana Creme Pie?  It’s pretty simple to make; bananas, pudding, whipped cream, pie shell.  Sell the pie by the piece, or as a whole pie.  Promote Pie Day a few weeks in advance and have guests put in orders for whole pies.  They pick them up on Pie Day (paid in advance).  Make various styles – plain crust vs. graham cracker; vanilla vs. chocolate, etc.

**Be creative!  Create several “Pie Days” through out the year – Fruit Compote Pie, Banana Cream Pie, or even savory pies – Chicken Pot Pie, Tamale Pie.  Schedule these special days during slow periods to boost sales.

Waffle Day, March 25th – Reuse?  Not many people have leftover waffles or even leftover flour.  The reuse is in the toppings.  Fruit compote (see above), or warm banana-maple topping (use those brow spotty bananas).  Be creative – add the fruit to the waffle batter or as a topping.

These are just a few of the food holidays over the next few months.  In the future we will be post more holidays and their possible reuse opportunities.

But what do you do with food that can’t be reduced any farther?  Well, in order from best to least desirable, first feed people (donate to a local food bank), then feed animals (pig farms, etc.).  The next step is Industrial uses.  We have all heard that used oils (fryer, vegetable, etc.) can be made into bio-diesel.  That’s an excellent reuse of a product that would otherwise go to a landfill.  But what if you don’t have the ability to convert used oil into bio-diesel?  If you are like a few students at the University of Florida – you turn it into soap.

They have a bio-diesel plant but it’s not running right now.  What do they do with all of this oil?  Send it to the landfill?  No, they thought of an alternate use – and might even turn a profit.

This soap is made from glycerin which is part of the bio-diesel process.  They color it with the team colors and scent it with essential oils (like orange).  It is then sold with their logo or in the shape of a gator.  A great, alternate idea to a very regular problem.

Check out the entire article at: http://www.gainesville.com/article/20091219/ARTICLES/912199979/1002?p=1&tc=pg

This is a great example of how a little thinking and entrepreneurship can help solve an unexpected problem.  If you plan a green initiative and something falls through – don’t give up!  Perhaps a little problem solving will give you an even better solution.

Just attended a good training webinar for the NEW Re-Trac program from WasteWise.  Re-Trac is a great program that can be used by any type of operation to “collect, organize, analyze and report” all recycling and waste.  Re-Trac is a web-based system that allows an operator to track many different types of waste:  Municipal/Solid Waste, Buy/Manufactured recycled product and several others.  Everything type of waste is tracked from wood, paper products, computers, batteries, to just about anything else.  (They also include “food” as a category – but it is meant for “food” as a general group.  To get very detailed food waste information – you will need a dedicated tracking system, either manual tracking or automated tracking like LeanPath’s systems.)

First you have to join WasteWise and they will give you access to the Re-Trac website.  Throughout the year simply log on to the site and type in the type of waste, measured in pounds or tonnes and what happened to the waste – source reduced, recycled, incinerated, or landfill.  The data gets saved – you get great reports – the EPA/WasteWise team gets real data to use in their studies.

By the way – one of the reports is just amazing!  The report equates the amount of product recycled/reduced/composted to number of trees saved (or pounds of Carbon reduced, or…).  Just a really super idea.  It’s something you can print and share with your staff to validate all their hard work at recycling and source reduction.

Check it out:  Waste Wise http://www.epa.gov/waste/partnerships/wastewise/index.htm

I just received an e-mail from our favorite contact at the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA).  She told me that they are almost finished with the newest version of the Food Waste Calculator.  It should be done later this month (August) and ready for posting on the EPA website at the beginning of September.  Hopefully in time for “Feeding America’s Hungry Action Month” which is the entire month of September.

Just a little info to get you interested…

The first version of the Food Waste Calculator was such a big hit, and received so many requests for additional categories that the EPA decided to create a ‘new and improved’ version.  The new version of the Food Waste Calculator will be a free download directly from the EPA website.  Any type of operator will be able to use it: grocery store, restaurant, hospital, university, etc.  It’s based on Excel and is very easy to use.  Andrew, Dave and Jennifer (that’s me!) from LeanPath were part of the group that tested the updated version of the calculator and submitted comments.

I have to say, it’s very easy to use.  And it’s FREE.  Any type of foodservice operation will be able to see the savings they can achieve just by plugging in a few numbers that they already have, like garbage fees or recycling costs.  There are also a few “yes/no” questions.  The calculator does the math for you and creates a savings analysis on a separate tab.  It gives you several different savings options for reducing food waste or diverting waste to other less exspensive areas.

I can’t say anything further – but keep on the look out for another blog post in a few weeks with the link to the new EPA Food Waste Calculator.

Silverbrook Farms: Your Waste is our Treasure!
Food waste (excluding poultry products) can be used to feed our hens – providing eggs, meat and fertilizer!   It’s a simple, elegant solution to reduce petroleum usage (grain), reduce landfill usage, and recycle food calories back into the growing cycle.  We desire to partner with a few visionary restaurants interested in separating food waste from non-organic material.  We sell at farmers’ markets in Boston and would drop off clean, closed containers and pick up containers of  food waste for our journey back to the farm.  We currently operate this system with UMass Dartmouth and Dartmouth High School. Please email Andy Pollock at farmsilverbrook@aol.com for information on how you can get involved.

That is a great idea! If you are in the Boston area and want to work with them, give them a shout.  If you are a farm located elsewhere and currently provide the same service, please let us know.  We are always interested to pass along helpful information.

This post was taken from the website and newsletter for Chefs Collaborative:  chefscollaborative@chefscollaborative.org It is a great resource for those in the restaurant business.

This link takes you to the EPA website where you can download this informational 2-page document. The document has over ten separate links for additional resources on reducing food waste.

http://www.epa.gov/osw/conserve/materials/organics/pubs/food-guide.pdf

There are many ways food service providers can improve the environment and provide benefits to communities by reducing, reusing, and recycling uneaten or unused food rather than throwing it away. This guide helps food service providers start a food waste reduction and recovery program at their facilities.

“Beware of little expenses; a small leak will sink a great ship,” said Benjamin Franklin

Our wasteful habits wouldn’t matter much if there were just a few of us—a Neanderthal hunting band could have discarded six plastic water bottles apiece every day with no real effect except someday puzzling anthropologists. But the volumes we manage are something else.

Chris Jordan is the photographer laureate of waste—his most recent project, “Running the Numbers,” uses exquisite images to show:

106,000 aluminum cans Americans toss every 30 seconds, or the

1 million plastic cups distributed on US airline flights every 6 hours, or the

2 million plastic beverage bottles we run through every 5 minutes, or the

426,000 cell phones we discard every day, or the

1.14 million brown paper supermarket bags we use each hour, or the

60,000 plastic bags we use every 5 seconds, or the

We toss 14 percent of the food we buy at the store. (so why do we need all those brown paper bags and plastic bags?)

15 million sheets of office paper we use every 5 minutes.

The simple amount of stuff it takes—energy especially—to manage this kind of throughput makes it daunting to even think about our waste problem. (Meanwhile, the next time someone tells you that population is at the root of our troubles, remind them that the average American uses more energy between the stroke of midnight on New Year’s Eve and dinner on January 2 than the average, say, Tanzanian consumes in a year. Population matters, but it really matters when you multiply it by proximity to Costco.)

Would you like me to go on? Americans discard enough aluminum to rebuild our entire commercial air fleet every three months—and aluminum represents less than 1 percent of our solid waste stream.

More than 46,000 pieces of plastic debris float on each square mile of ocean.

It’s something to think about…

Well – this cute video follow “Miles the Can” through the different stages of becoming a can, and then all of his different recycled ‘lives’ – (minus the catchy music…)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w1JkYJdA4qU&feature=player_embedded

Although this video doesn’t pertain exactly to food waste, it does show how we can save our resources by the simple act of recycling and buying products made from recycled materials.

Check it out.