Food Waste Intelligence

When you’ve done all that you can to prevent waste, the next best option on the EPA Food Recovery Hierarchy is feeding hungry people. And when one in six United States citizens receives food assistance, it's as important as ever to do our best to ensure excess edible food makes it to a hungry person instead of a landfill.

Boloco is a regional restaurant chain headquartered in Boston that offers bold and inspired wraps and smoothies. A Certified Green business but not one to boast, Boloco is “quietly doing our part to help the earth without making a big deal out of it.”

Food waste: for some kitchens, it’s considered a four-letter word. It’s a topic that people avoid talking about, even if it means ignoring an elephant in the room. For other operations, food waste represents an opportunity for them to do better, save money and help the environment.

St. Norbert College, in De Pere, Wisconsin, serves about 2,200 students out of one main kitchen on two floors in its newly renovated Ruth's Marketplace dining hall. With a goal to be a zero waste dining program, they had already transitioned to “trayless” dining, started a composting program, and purchased a waste pulping machine. However, they were still experiencing a lot of waste and had a hard time controlling ever-rising food costs.

We’ve shared with our readers that “food waste management” is one of the top 10 culinary trends for 2015 according to the National Restaurant Association (NRA) report, but as a category this is a pretty broad topic. So what do we expect to see people doing differently in 2015 as it relates to food waste management? In this month's focus article, I delve deeper into four specific trends that we are already seeing emerge across the industry, and which I believe will gain steam throughout the year.