Food Waste Prevention Week: Local options for businesses looking to reduce their food waste!
The Rethink Waste Project has worked to engage individuals and families in reducing their food waste through our Food Waste Challenges, Food Waste and Composting Workshops, and through our general education initiatives. As critical as it is for individuals to reduce their food waste (household food waste accounts for almost half of all food wasted in the U.S.!), that is just one piece of the puzzle. This year, for Food Waste Prevention Week, we are diving into the world of food waste in businesses, rather than households. In 2023, the foodservice industry in Oregon wasted approximately 8,000 garbage trucks worth of food, accounting for 15% of the state’s total food waste.
Do you work at or manage a grocery store or restaurant, but aren’t sure where to start to reduce your food waste? First, consider the top two most impactful actions you can take:
- Prevention. The most impactful way to reduce food waste is to prevent having extra food in the first place. Your business can start by conducting a waste audit to determine what foods are most commonly thrown away. This can help you reassess purchasing practices to only buy what you’ll use. Practices like proper food storage, offering small portion sizes, and small batch cooking are some of several changes that can help prevent waste!
- Donation. If you do end up with extra food, the best option is to donate. Unopened ingredients or unscooped pans of food that have been safely cooled or held hot, with ingredients clearly listed, can be donated. A great local option for donation is NeighborImpact, which works with over 50 partner organizations to tackle food insecurity in Central Oregon. Reach out to them at food@neighborimpact.org for more information on donating and becoming a partner. Because 1 in 5 Central Oregonians do not have consistent and reliable access to healthy food, donating is always the best option.
Perhaps you’ve worked on prevention and still have excess food waste. If you’ve investigated local donation options, and they aren’t currently accepting what you have, you could consider a food waste app that is just starting to take off in Central Oregon– Too Good To Go. Read on to learn more about one local business’s experience with this app.
Holm Made Toffee’s food waste journey!
Holm Made Toffee, a locally owned and operated artisan toffee maker, is one of only a handful of businesses in Central Oregon using the food waste app Too Good To Go. In other cities, such as Portland, there are several grocery stores and restaurants selling food through the app that would otherwise go to waste. So, we at the Rethink Waste Project have been wondering: How does this app work? What role could it play in our local food waste initiatives? How could other Central Oregonian businesses learn more?
Thankfully, Randi Holm, one of the owners of Holm Made Toffee, was willing to sit down with us, answer these questions, and share more about how she works to reduce food waste in her kitchen! Read on for a summary of our interview:
- Why is reducing waste in your business important to you?
It started off more as a fiscal responsibility issue, and maybe less for environmental reasons. As a small business, and especially in the last few years, costs have sky-rocketed. But I’ve really started looking at it now for both the fiscal and environmental reasons, I think both are really important. It never feels good just throwing something away that still has value to it, from a fiscal perspective or when you think about just the waste- I mean our landfill is almost full in Bend. So it’s just been more top of mind for me, maybe in the last year or two. - What are some ways you reduce food waste in your kitchen?
Because we do everything by hand- our cooks are hand stirring, hand pouring- they’re able to control our waste more than a large machine would. They’re taking a spatula to the bowl and getting every last drop- we stop short of licking the spatula.. don’t worry about that! Same with our packaging process, we have a crew doing all the breaking by hand. As they break up the toffee sheets, we have little pieces that fall off- pieces of toffee, chocolate, etc. We package over large clean baking trays so that we can then take those little bits and, instead of throwing them away or having them fall on the floor, we are able to package that into our “Little Bits,” which we then sell as a dessert topping! - How did you hear about Too Good To Go?
Too Good To Go is just another layer- we were already doing Mystery Bags on our website before I heard about Too Good To Go. For our Mystery Bags, we would take anything that’s about to go out of date or something that wasn’t perfect enough to go on the shelf, maybe just slightly off in texture or an “ugly toffee” that’s still perfectly delicious. So then when I heard about the app, it was really easy because we were already doing the Mystery Bags internally. The app just gets more eyes and gets us out to the people who maybe didn’t know about us here in Bend. - Tell us a bit about how the app works.
We work a lot with Local Acres, and so when I’d go in to stock their shelves with our toffee, they would have a rack labeled “Too Good To Go” and every week I’d peek at it and there were always really good, fun products on there. So I started to ask them- what’s this about? They told me all about the app, how great it was, and that we should sign up- so we did! It’s not something we do every week, because we try not to have that waste in the first place. But when we do have a batch that turns or is about to go past its “best by” date, it’s a great resource to have. - If other businesses are interested in joining Too Good To Go or finding other ways to reduce their waste, what are the first steps they should take?
I downloaded the app on my phone to look at it from a customer perspective before I signed up as a business. We’re not generally open to the public, we’re not a store, so I wanted to make sure it would work for a commercial kitchen, and it has worked beautifully! - Is there anything else you’d like to share?
I do think we have it somewhat easier than restaurants, because of the nature of being a commercial kitchen that produces one product. Restaurants don’t know how many people they’re going to have come through the door, and you don’t want to run out of food, but then you also don’t want too much waste. So, full disclosure, it has been easier for me to eliminate most waste than I think it would be for a restaurant. And that’s why I think more local restaurants signing up for Too Good To Go is going to have the biggest impact, because they do have the most waste at the end of the day, and the app can really help eliminate some of that.
Thank you Randi for sharing your time, tips, and toffee with our team!
Final thoughts
After prevention, donation, and finding creative ways to utilize excess food, you may still find yourself with food waste that needs to be disposed of. In that case, commercial composting is a great way to keep your business’s food waste out of the landfill, where its breakdown in the absence of oxygen produces methane, contributing to climate change. In our resource section below, you can learn more about commercial composting from Central Oregon’s two waste haulers. Is your business also working to reduce food waste? We would love to hear your tips!
Resources