The global wasted food crisis is staggering, with roughly one third of all food that’s produced being thrown away. The U.S. alone generates 63 million tons of wasted food annually—the vast majority of it going to landfill.
Consumer-facing businesses are significant contributors, generating 20 percent of this waste, with nearly half of that coming from restaurants. This reveals a troubling reality: restaurant operators are effectively paying for their food twice—once when they purchase the food and again when throwing it away.
This presents a unique opportunity for cost savings and sustainability. But, food service managers are often operating with limited resources and time, making it challenging to understand and implement the best solutions. What sustainable practices and solutions will truly make an immediate impact, align with your business needs, and help your business reach its goals?
Enter Anaerobic Digestion: A Sustainable, Scalable Solution
Anaerobic digestion (AD) technology is one solution that has emerged to help commercial food service operators handle wasted food sustainably and cost effectively, while helping businesses comply with critical organic waste regulations. AD offers a powerful solution to the commercial wasted food crisis. This natural process, where bacteria break down organic matter in the absence of oxygen, is already present in our environment—think wetlands and marshes.
The AD process begins with mechanically pretreating waste to create a liquid slurry. This involves removing plastics and packaging—like clamshells and produce stickers—before screening the slurry to eliminate detectable plastics. Once prepared, the slurry is fed into a digester where energy is captured, and nutrients are extracted for reuse. The water used in this process can be repurposed for irrigation or treated to return safely to the environment. The result? Two beneficial byproducts: renewable energy and a nutrient-rich soil amendment. This creates a truly circular economy: the renewable energy created through this process can be used to power homes and businesses in local communities and the soil amendment allows for the nutrients from food to return to farmland, thereby supporting further food growth.
While AD is an ideal solution for commercial food service operators, composting is often raised as another potential solution. Composting can be effective in some use cases, but it is not an ideal solution for commercial wasted food or anything that could be contaminated with plastic. Introducing microplastics into the composting process can create a bigger problem down the line that negatively impacts microbial processes and plant growth. Depackaging solutions that carefully remove packaging without shredding or crushing, combined with AD technology, ensures that there is no plastic left on the food. In doing so, one can eliminate the microplastics risk and any environmental issues. What’s more, the high moisture content of wasted food is disruptive to the composting process, which means it may require additional digester processing that might not be supported by existing treatment options. Since AD is a wet process, it is already well suited to process the high moisture content in wasted food.
Benefitting the Bottom Line
Implementing the right solutions to manage wasted food has a cost savings benefit as well. Especially in looking at end-to-end solutions that go beyond simply managing wasted food at the end of its life, but also offer prevention and donation opportunities. This is especially important in the restaurant industry, which wastes up to 10 percent of the food purchased. As much as 33 pounds of wasted food is generated per $1,000 of a restaurant’s revenue.
Alongside AD technologies, improved tracking of wasted food through implementing other effective technology solutions could unlock a $3 billion economic opportunity for the food service industry annually. This would have the potential to reduce up to 1.05 million tons of wasted food, reduce up to 5.76 million metric tons of CO2 emissions, save up to 478 billion gallons of water, and ultimately create more than 1,500 jobs industry-wide.
Staying Compliant with Waste Regulations
Commercial food service operators also need to ensure compliance with emerging and existing regulations or risk financial penalties. California’s Senate Bill 1383 (SB 1383) and other organic waste management regulations employ a mix of incentives and penalties to prevent wasted food from reaching landfills—and recover donatable food to feed people in need. In the case of SB 1383, the law also encourages the use of solutions like anaerobic digestion to create renewable energy. Noncompliance, in the case of SB1383 for example, can lead to penalties of up to $100 for the first violation, escalating to $500 for subsequent offenses—per location.
Just recently, the White House, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), the U.S. Department of Agriculture and the U.S. Food and Drug Administration released the first ever national strategy for reducing food loss and waste and recycling organics to accelerate the prevention of wasted food. As more states join the effort against the wasted food crisis, looking to tools like the Food Waste Legislative Tracker will help ensure businesses are knowledgeable and compliant on the latest in-progress legislation efforts.
Scalable Solutions with Long Term Impact
Not all wasted food solutions are created equal. Commercial food service operators must seek solutions that not only are scalable and make good business sense, but allow them to remain compliant with critical regulations—or risk paying the price. Anaerobic digestion technologies offer the right solution for the wasted food crisis at hand, empowering businesses for the greatest long term impact.
Frenchie Audette is the VP of Food Service and Industrials at Divert, Inc., an impact technology company on a mission to Protect the Value of Food™. In this role, he brings nearly two decades of food service industry expertise to build impactful partnerships and strategies that align with the evolving needs of national restaurant brands. A seasoned leader with an extensive background in restaurant technology and hospitality, Frenchie has held key leadership roles across the industry, including with Local Kitchens, Square, Inc., and as a former restaurant owner.
