VSAG on Waste Watch: Reduce Food Waste with New Toolkit

As we continue to champion waste reduction and applaud restaurant industry efforts to do so, we thought we’d highlight a recent discovery that takes positive steps for reducing food waste piling into America’s landfills every day. Because the concern isn’t going away soon, there are some helpful resources and tools to aid businesses in their efforts to reduce waste and negative impacts on the earth.

The Food Waste Reduction Alliance (FWRA) has created a Toolkit that is a product of the combined forces of the manufacturing, retail, and restaurant industries (namely the Grocery Manufacturers Association, Food Marketing Institute & National Restaurant Association) to help eradicate the reported one in six Americans who receive food assistance, and to help reduce the amount of waste that is being dumped into our landfills, which are becoming increasingly over-burdened with wasted food.

The collective efforts of the FWRA have garnered the attention and support from more than 30 leading national food industry companies such as Feeding America, United Grocers, Kellogg’s, Nature’s Best, and General Mills.

And now the FWRA Toolkit puts their initiatives on paper (and into action) by helping to guide food businesses through the basic steps of finding solutions to reduce their food waste footprint.

Referencing not only the FWRA Toolkit, but also conducting research on ways to affect change locally and gathering tools to develop an action plan that works within the realm of your business, can be impactful to your business and your local environment. Consider ways to donate excess safe/nutritious food, institute and maintain an aggressive recycling program, compost all food scraps, and divert (i.e. use food abundance to create animal feed instead of waste) leftover food whenever possible. There are likely food pantries, shelters, and kitchens that feed the hungry and homeless that can collect leftover bread and other unused ingredients or food items right from your business.

Any steps you take will have a positive effect on your environmental, sustainability, and responsibility legacies.

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*Reducing food waste, one step at a time: foodwastealliance.org