When Zoe Wong moved to the San Francisco Bay Area three years ago, she fell in love with the fresh and abundant produce from surrounding farmers’ markets. Wong grew up in Hong Kong, where fruits and vegetables were scarce and imported. After attending college in upstate New York, she moved to California, the largest agricultural state in the country.
Soon, though, Wong discovered something was off. “At the market, I’d see farmers getting ready to throw out boxes and boxes of fruit and vegetables they couldn’t sell,” she says. “I was shocked.”
To preserve as much of the unwanted produce as possible, she launched a jam company called Revive Foods. But one year in, she realized she was spending a great deal of energy finding the produce and making sure it got used in time. What the area needed, she decided, was a marketplace to enable dozens of small businesses to turn a surplus bounty into jam, juice, baby food and other products.
The result, Cerplus, which launched in January with the aim of reducing the millions of tons of unwanted fruits and vegetables from farms and retailers nationwide. Unsold produce from supermarkets accounts for about $15bn each year, according to the US Department of Agriculture.
Cerplus buyers sign up to get a daily email or text alert about surplus produce deals that are typically around 30% off the standard wholesale price. Cerplus arranges for delivery and takes a small cut. So far, Wong says the company has moved more than 11,000 lbs of produce from 20 farms and produce distributors within California.
This nascent effort isn’t unique. Throughout Silicon Valley, and beyond, technology companies are working to keep food out of landfills. And, like Cerplus, many of them are tackling food recovery – diverting imperfect or extra food to ensure it gets eaten – through web and mobile services.
The newly launched San Francisco-based Souper Seconds focuses on selling organic blemished and overstock produce from farms to wholesellers. Washington DC-based Food Cowboy and Berkeley-based Copia both manage and deliver food donations. In the Boston area, graduate students from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology are building Spoiler Alert to help organizations meet different food waste reduction goals. The first part of Spoiler Alert is a free online marketplace that allows businesses, including farms, to sell or donate surplus food to hunger relief groups via apps, texts or emails. Zero Percent has an app that offers a similar service in Chicago. Leftover Swap helps smartphone users swap or give away their leftover food.
“Food waste happens not because businesses intend to waste the food but because they’re often disconnected from one another and lack a real-time solution,” says Ricky Ashenfelter, co-founder and CEO of Spoiler Alert.
Hunger relief organizations also are turning to technology to help manage donations. Feeding America, the nation’s largest hunger relief organization, is building an online portal to match food donors with food banks and other community meal service groups nationwide. Businesses that donate could benefit from a federal legislation passed last December, which allows more businesses to get tax deductions for donating food.
Developing technology only solves part of the problem, however. Attracting loyal users is the key. “The challenge these companies all have is reaching a critical mass. Craigslist is only valuable because everyone’s on it,” says Dana Gunders, senior scientist at Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC).
While salvaging surplus food is a good strategy for solving the national food waste problem, preventing it from materializing in the first place should be a priority, according to the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA)’s guideline on reducing food waste. Reducing the need to grow, ship and buy food leads to a much larger reduction in greenhouse gasses and greater savings.
Prevention is one of the goals of LeanPath, founded in 2004 to develop software for kitchens in colleges, hospitals, corporate dining facilities, hotels and military bases. Overstocking food is a common practice because of worries about running out of supplies and keeping display cases filled, says Andrew Shakman, LeanPath’s CEO.
Kitchen crews don’t usually consider the myriad of financial and environmental costs of trashing unused ingredients or uneaten dishes. If they do, then they are likely to be more mindful of buying and cooking only enough to meet demand.
Each LeanPath system comes with scales, a camera and a digital terminal for the kitchen workers to weigh what they plan to toss away and enter data about the ingredient types and quantities.
“While you record [what you’re getting rid of], we’re telling you what it’s worth in dollars, the environmental implications, the cost, how many cars on the road it represents. Trying to make it vivid and alive for people,” Shakman says.
The University of California in San Francisco has been using LeanPath for two years. The technology helps the kitchen managers at one of its hospitals to pinpoint problems and solutions, according to Dan Henroid, the university’s director of nutrition and food services. The system has already changed the kitchen staff’s food preparation practices, cut the amount of waste by 34.5% and saved nearly $60,000 in the past two years, Henroid says. For example, the cooks now make sure they use all of the meat they buy, including using leftovers to make new dishes.
“When we started we were seeing a lot of wasted protein,” Henroid recalls. Considering the high carbon footprint of meat production, he continues: “If we’re going to make a decision to purchase meat, we better use it to our best ability and not be throwing it out.” Figuring out new uses for other excess ingredients, such as cooked vegetables, rice and scrambled eggs, can prove more challenging.
But, while prevention is effective, it can be less gratifying, Shakman says. “Food service employees really like donation because it’s a chance for them to be philanthropic. We just don’t want to see excess production get institutionalized in order to donate because it’s a highly inefficient way to get food to people in need.”
To preserve the philanthropic opportunity, Shakman recommends that companies set aside a portion of the money they save from reducing food waste and donate it to those in need. Meanwhile, Cerplus is looking at expanding its services to promote prevention. Wong says she would like to help farmers secure purchase contracts before each harvest season begins.
Ultimately, Gunders says, eliminating food waste is about changing our cultural practices. She points to an example in South Korea, where a company has built scales and sensors into trash bins to measure the amount of food waste tossed away by their customers, who must scan their ID cards to use the bins. An operator then collects the data and bills people for exceeding what they are allowed to throw away.
“Behavior is such a core component of preventing food waste,” Gunders says. “Without that we’re sort of dancing on the precipice.”
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