Cutting food waste to save money

Getting rid of trays to cut food waste has cut costs for one university.

Associated press

Experts in the food industry are thinking a lot about trash these days.

Food waste has been a chronic problem for restaurants and grocery stores — with millions of tons being lost along the way as crops are hauled hundreds of miles, stored for weeks in refrigerators and prepared on hectic restaurant assembly lines. But the historically high price of commodities is making it an even bigger drag on the bottom line.

Restaurants, colleges, hospitals and other institutions are compensating for the rising costs of waste in novel ways. Some are tracking their trash with software systems, making food in smaller batches or trying to compost and cut down on trash-hauling costs.

“We have all come to work with this big elephant in the middle of the kitchen, and the elephant is this ‘It’s okay to waste’ belief system,” said Andrew Shackman, president of LeanPath Inc., a company that helps restaurants cut back food waste.

“The interest level [in cutting food waste] has just skyrocketed in the last six to nine months,” he said.

Roughly 30 percent of food in the U.S. goes to waste, costing some $48 billion annually, according to a Stockholm Water Institute study released this summer. A 2004 University of Arizona study put the total higher, estimating that 40 percent to 50 percent of U.S. food is wasted.

Wholesale food costs have risen more than 8 percent this year alone, the biggest jump in decades, according the National Restaurant Association. That comes after a 7.6 percent increase in 2007.

Though that makes it more expensive to toss food out, Shackman said there’s no easy answer for cutting back on waste because each kitchen is run so differently. That means institutions are devising their own solutions.

Freshman students at Virginia Tech were surprised this year when they entered two of the campus’s biggest dining halls, only to find there weren’t cafeteria trays. The school got rid of the trays this summer to cut down on leftovers going into the trash.

Getting rid of trays has cut food waste by 38 percent at the cafeterias, said Denny Cochrane, manager of Virginia Tech’s sustainability program. Before the program began, students often grabbed whatever looked good at the buffet, only to find at the table that their eyes were bigger than their stomachs, he said.

That same phenomenon often happens at Oregon’s Portland International Airport. Busy travelers often discard half-eaten meals into trash cans, adding dozens of tons of waste that the airport must pay the city to haul away.

Now the airport is ramping up a three-year-old program to install food-only trash cans. The food waste is collected in biodegradable bags and given to the city to use as compost, said Stan Jones, aviation environmental compliance manager at the airport.

Besides being environmentally friendly, the changes may eventually save the airport money. It costs about $82 to have 1 ton of trash hauled from the airport to the city landfill. But food waste only costs about $48 a ton to haul away. Last year, the airport was able to divert 165 tons of food out of the trash stream, which would equal a savings of roughly $5,600 in hauling fees alone. That’s an increase from the year before, when about 157 tons were composted.

But composting remains a costly proposition, Jones said. That’s because the biodegradable bags “cost a fortune.” Ultimately, it’s more expensive to compost the food than throw it away. But the airport is continuing the program with an eye on the future. Cutting back on the waste can require spending money on software and in training employees how to use it.