foodrescue | We Future Cycle

The discarding of untouched, fully packaged food items, just because one doesn’t feel like eating them right now, is an everyday reality in schools. WeFutureCycle is working within the schools to have share tables and goodie bag systems to feed these perfect food items into the hands (and mouths) of the ones that would like to consume them.

But the commercial untouched food waste is absolutely staggering and frightening. According to USDA about 16 % of all foods grown do not make it into the stores at all. Mostly for reasons of consumer quality expectations. Any blemish or too much of size deviation is a reason to reject that piece of fruit.

In addition to those initial 16% , there is an additional 30% of loss at the retail and consumer level. The retail level is comprised of packaging errors, transportation loss due to loss of cooling chain or other issues, and of course the running out of date at the grocery store. Store retail space is of high value, which means that if products are not selling well, the entire stock will be discarded to make room for another product that will turn over quickly.

A recent visit at the Quantum Power Bio Digester Plant in Southington CT was an eye-opening, shocking and utterly frightening experience. We saw pallets and pallets and pallets of untouched foods, being crushed so that the juice could be fed into the bio-digester for energy production. An entire factory hall with hundreds of pallets of yogurts, soda, grapes, strawberries, lettuce, canned fruits, juices…… all deemed below consumer expectations.

It was shocking to see people working to destroy food. The cost to society for consumers to reject slightly imperfect food is truly staggering. 46% of all grown, packaged, loaded, unloaded, displayed is being destroyed. 46%!!

Schools that are part of the National School Lunch program are walking a fine line between following guidelines that require students to take required food items and wasting food if the students are taking items that they are not intending to actually consume.

We Future Cycle’s mission in the lunchrooms is to teach students to sort their lunch waste into compost, recycling and trash. This simple change of behavior reduces garbage by over 90% and as by-product, it sheds light on just how much the students are being served that they do not consume.

Let’s step back to understand this problem better.

The National School Lunch Program (NSLP) is a federally assisted meal program operating in public and nonprofit private schools and residential child care institutions. It provides nutritionally balanced, low-cost or free lunches to children each school day. The program was established under the National School Lunch Act, signed by President Harry Truman in 1946.

Clear nutritional guidelines were established in 2012 under Michelle Obama’s guidance to make sure that commercial food service providers would not use the cheapest of all ingredients to feed the nations youngest for a quick buck.

Here is the link to the actual guidelines

These guidelines come with certain amounts of grain, protein, fruit, veggies and milk.

As students are sorting their lunch leftovers, we are also capturing the untouched, commercially wrapped food items to repurpose them, rather then just dumping them. COVID did not make this problem any easier.

This is the untouched food waste of ONE breakfast in ONE school. It is shocking and WeFutureCycle is working with the schools to find avenues to repurpose and donate these items back into the community as well as changing the menu to foster food acceptance.