Fighting hunger and food loss through unconventional partnerships

By Erika Thiem, Chief Supply Chain Officer at Feeding America

You might not expect four different organisations to be interested in sorting through a compost bin and reviewing store waste data, but that is exactly what happened earlier this year when Divert, Feeding America, Safeway and Alameda County Community Food Bank staff came together during Safeway store visits to review opportunities to strengthen its donations programme.

“Preventing and reducing food waste is a long-standing priority for Albertsons Companies and as part of this effort, we’re focused on donating edible food to our food recovery partners and diverting inedible food from landfill,” says John Bernardo, Senior Manager for Food Donation and Food Waste Diversion, Albertsons Companies. “Gathering and analyzing real-time data supports the success of our Recipe for Change framework, which includes fighting food insecurity in the communities we serve and reducing food waste.”

In June, the Biden-Harris Administration announced a national strategy to reduce food loss and waste. The objectives of the four-part strategy include preventing food loss; preventing food waste; increasing the recycling rate for organic waste; and supporting policies and incentives that will further advance this work.The food industry has been fighting waste long before the COVID-19 pandemic and recent regulations that can penalize producers for disposing of food waste in landfills. Similarly, nonprofit food rescue and hunger-relief organisations have been working to safely recover nutritious food for distribution to individuals and families experiencing food insecurity for more than 60 years.

Waste not, want not: Rethinking food waste

But now the need to address hunger in America and the environmental impact of food waste is more urgent than ever. This urgency, in combination with technology advancements, is unlocking new, complementary partnerships between for-profit food waste solution providers and nonprofit food rescue and hunger-relief organisations.

One example is the national partnership between Divert and Feeding America:

Divert provides an end-to-end solution that prevents waste by maximizing the freshness of food,recovers high-quality, safe food before it expires to feed communities in need, and converts any food that can’t be donated into renewable energy. 

Feeding America is the nation’s largest hunger-relief organization, part of a nationwide network of food banks, neighborhood food pantries and other community-based organizations which provide dignified access to nutritious food.

In working with national grocery retailers, Divert collects store-level data on wasted food in its proprietary bins brought back to its facilities from retailers, while Feeding America’s MealConnect® platform gathers donation data. By leveraging a combination of these unique solutions, retailers are empowered to identify opportunities to increase donations with greater accuracy, thereby optimizing their food recovery efforts and reducing waste. This can result in donating food with more remaining shelf life, increasing the frequency of food bank donation pickups and improving inventory management procedures.

The impact of the collective work is clear. Safeway and Divert announced in June that in just three months, Safeway increased its food donations in Northern California by 20 percent, reducing the edible food going to waste by an average of 1,252 pounds per store per month. Additionally, in 10.5 million donation pick-ups through MealConnect, rescuing over 6.4 billion pounds of food since the app launched in 2017.

The complementary approach of this unconventional partnership is delivering benefits for neighbors facing hunger, retailers, the planet, and communities writ large through a collaborative approach to protecting the value and intended purpose of food.