Podcasts about refed

Do you pay attention to information printed on food labels? From eye-catching designs companies use to entice you to buy a product to nutrition facts panels to the tiny dates printed on packages. There's a lot going on to be sure. For policymakers, they hope that refining date labels on food packaging will help reduce the amount of uneaten food ending up in landfills. Food Waste is a major contributor to greenhouse gas emissions. The Food and Drug Administration and the Food Safety and Inspection Service recently asked for public input on food date labels. So, we decided to gather some experts together to talk about this important policy tool. Roni Neff is a professor in the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health and Senior Advisor at the School's Center for a Livable Future. Her research looks at the intersection of food waste policy, climate change, and food system resilience. Brian Roe is a professor at the Ohio State University Department of Agricultural, Environmental and Developmental Economics. His work focuses on issues including agricultural marketing, information policy, behavioral economics, and product quality. Ruiqing Miao is an associate professor of agricultural economics and rural sociology at Auburn University's College of Agriculture. His research emphasizes sustainability, innovation, and decision making. Interview Summary Brian, let's begin with you and let's make sure everyone's on the same page. Can you talk to us a little bit about what date labels are and where they are on packaging. And what is industry required to include in terms of these date labels? Yes, so date labels, we see them anytime we pick up a food package. Most packages are going to have some type of date label on them. Oddly, federal law doesn't regulate these or really require these other than the exception of infant formula, which is the only federal requirement domain out there. But in the absence of federal regulation, states have kind of done their own thing. About 40 different states require date labels on at least some food products. And about 20 states prohibit or restrict the sale or donation of food past the label date. And even though states that require date labels, manufacturers can still choose the dates. There are no real regulations on them. So, recognizing that confusion over date labels can lead to unnecessary food waste, Government and industry actors have made, you know, some efforts to try to standardize date labeling language. But nothing terribly authoritative. Now, some states have introduced bills that seek to standardize date labels, with the motivation to try to get rid of and reduce food waste. California being perhaps the most recent of these. In 2024, they passed a bill that prohibits the use of any date label other than 'Best if Used By,' the phrase that goes along with foods where the date represents kind of a quality indicator. And then the phrase 'Use By,", if that date has some implications for product safety. The bill doesn't go into effect until July of '26, so we're going to see if this is going to create a domino effect across other states, across the food manufacturing center or even bubble up and be dealt with at the federal legislation level. Now, industries tried to do things before. Back in 2017, the Food Marketing Institute and the Grocers Manufacturers Association had a standardized date labeling suggestion that some firms bought into. FDA has given out some guidance about preferring 'Best if Used By' on certain food products to indicate quality. But again, we're all kind of waiting to see if there might be a federal legislation that kind of brings these state labels into check. Thanks, Brian. And it's really important to know about the policy landscape and the fact that there hasn't been a federal policy across all foods. And it's interesting to see the efforts of, say, in California. I think this begs the question; how do consumers actually process the information of date labels? This fascinated us too. A very clever person at Ohio State that I work with, Dr. Aishwarya Badiger, led a study I was part of. We enlisted consumers to come into the Consumer Evaluation Lab that we have here on campus and evaluate samples of milk. They were presented with the label of each milk. We gave them a little glass with a nose full of the milk that they could sniff. So, they're looking at the date label, they're given the sample they could smell, and then we kind of asked them, Hey, if this were in your fridge, would you keep it or toss it? But the entire time we actually had them fitted with special glasses that precisely track their eye movements so we could understand kind of which information they were looking at while they went through the whole process of evaluating and then making their decision. Consumers overwhelmingly looked at the date itself on the package and largely ignored the phrase or the words that go along with the date. In fact, for more than half of the evaluations, the consumer's eyes never went anywhere near the phrase. This is important. And actually, we'll talk about that a little bit more with some of our other guests. So, what are the implications of date label policies? So the eye tracking research really drove home to me that dates are much more salient than phrases. Although all the policies largely deal with the phrases. Dates give you actionable information. People can look at the date on the label, look at the calendar, and man, that's something they can do something about. They can act based upon that. The phrases are a little bit more ambiguous as Roni will talk about later. I think that people have a hard time interpreting what those phrases really mean. That doesn't mean we should not try to unify those phrases, but rather this is going to be a longer-term investment in educational infrastructure that until those phrases really become salient and actionable to consumers. And then become more of a critical component of the policies. But right now, policies are generally silent on dates. And dates seem to be the real action mover. Yeah. So why don't we just get rid of all of this? What would be the implications? Yes. We did this experiment too. Same kind of setup. Had people come in, they had the jug of the milk in front of them. They had a glass of milk that they could sniff. Same thing. And we had a bunch of different milks. We had some that were only like 15 days post pasteurization. Some that went out to like 40 days past pasteurization. So, the youngest or the freshest had about three days, quote unquote, left on its date label. The 40-day old milk was like two or three weeks past the date. And we did two things. We had them evaluate the milk with the dates on the jugs, and then we had ones where we took the dates and the labels off the milk. Not surprisingly, when they did not have the dates on the milk, they were much more likely to say that they would keep the milk. Even that 40-day old milk, about half of them said, yeah, I'd drink this. I'd keep this if it were in my fridge. But it wasn't a slam dunk. So, our youngest and freshest milk had an odd flavor note. You know, sometimes as the seasons change, feed sources change for cattle, you get an odd flavor note. It's not spoilage, it's just a slightly different note. And when people have the date label, they were much more willing to give that milk a second chance and say that they would keep it. But if the date label wasn't on there, they took that odd flavor note and said, I'm going to toss this milk. So, it's really kind of a nuanced thing. And if you would take those off, I think you're going to get some consumers who are going to kind of freak out without any guidance. And they might have kind of an itchy trigger finger when it comes to throwing away that milk or other products. So, it's compelling. We've seen England, the UK, do this; take dates off of certain products. But I would probably want to see a little more example of how consumers are responding to that before I fully endorse that as kind of a policy movement forward. Brian, thank you for that. And I have got to say, I was not expecting to have a conversation about the bouquet of a glass of milk. But this is really an interesting finding, and it does help us understand some other things that we're going to talk about. Roni, I want to turn our attention to you. And I know you are someone who's been involved in understanding date labels for a while. And I really appreciate it and I've said it before, but you're the reason I got into this work. I want to understand a little bit more about what are important things to understand about the misconceptions that consumers may have about food date labels? And why does it matter for policymakers? Well, I'll start with just saying that conceptions are what we know rationally. And it's not the whole picture because as Brian was alluding to a lot of our decision making is going on in our emotions. And like I can tell my son all day long the fact that that milk is okay, he's going to toss it because he doesn't trust it. There's a lot more going on than conceptions. But I want to talk about two misconceptions. The first one is that despite what Brian just said about the fact that these date labels other than infant formula aren't federally regulated, about two in five people think that they are. We just did a national consumer survey in January 2025, and this is one of the findings. And I did that along with Emily Broad Lieb from the Harvard Food Law and Policy Project and Akif Khan also from there, and then Dana Gunders from ReFED. And in addition to this idea that they're federally regulated, I'll say that these kinds of beliefs were most common among those who were 18 to 34, parents with children under age 18, and black and Hispanic consumers. Our earlier work also found that those who think that food date labels are federally regulated are more likely to discard food based on them. All this speaks to a real challenge. And, you know, it kind of makes sense, like if you see something and you trust it, that it's from the federal government. And of course, we all trust the federal government these days. If you trust it, then you're going to respond to it. So that's an implication for food policy. And then the next thing we did also is that we tested understanding of five different food date label phrases: a date with no text, and then two of those phrases accompanied by icon images. And since none of these actually have a federally recognized meaning the correct answer for all of them in terms of the meaning is like other. But we also accepted answers that were aligned with that voluntary industry standard, just to kind of see how people were perceiving it. And, across all of these labels, only an average of 53% of people answered correctly about what these labels meant. Now, consumers were pretty good at identifying 'Best if Used By' as a quality label. But the real challenge comes in with 'Use By' which under the voluntary industry standards should be a safety label. And more people thought it was a quality label than thought it was a safety label; 44% versus 49%. And so, we need to clear up these misconceptions in support of food safety, in support of food waste prevention. But in order to do that, we need to be able to tell people clearly what the labels mean. And we can't really do that if there's no standardized meaning of what they mean. So, we really need a national standard, and that is the policy implication. Thank you for that. And I know Ruiqing and I have done some work in this space and in part learning from what you all have done. I'm interested because you mentioned the 2025 survey, but of course you also mentioned the 2016 survey. Are there any big shifts or anything that you want to tell us about changes that you see from those two different surveys? We asked a number of the same or almost identical questions in those two surveys. And since that time, we've adopted a voluntary industry standard and there's been a lot of education and communication about wasted food. And yet in our survey we actually found that things were going in the wrong direction. Consumer misunderstandings of date labels increased. Those who quote always or usually discard food based on the label: in 2016, that was 37%, and this year it was 43%. And then in terms of belief that these are federally regulated: in 2016 it was 36% and now it's 44%. We're going in the wrong direction despite all these activities, and I don't know why. I think for those who are looking for future research questions, this would be a really interesting one. This is really disturbing because all of the information that's come out about date labels. I thought people would understand this. And that this is where we would be in a different place. So, this work is really important. So, how did people's response to date labels vary by food item? Did you see any differences? Because this is something that comes up often that people may be more responsive to some food products versus others? Yeah, indeed. We asked about five different foods, and we showed a bunch of different labels for each food. And the responses did vary both based on the item and based on what label was on it. And I'll start with where caution is needed. Deli meats are one example of where we really want people to pay attention to that label. And while there's no federal standard that label's the best piece of information people has, so they should use it. And we found that only 65% would throw out the deli meat before, on, or just after the 'Use By' label. And the number of people that would respond to it reduced with other labels that were used, and older adults were most likely to disregard those labels. And they may be particularly vulnerable in terms of foodborne illness. So that's when lack of caution leads to risk. On the other hand, when caution leads to waste, we looked at raw chicken, pasteurized milk, lettuce, and breakfast cereal. And for all of those there, like the label is really only telling you about quality, and consumers should use their senses to decide, and knowledge of how that was, stored to decide whether to eat it. And so, the most common out of all five foods, including the deli, the one that they responded the strongest to was raw chicken. And that chicken can be contaminated as we know, but if you cook it, you're killing those bacteria, so it's okay. And averaging across all those different date labels, we found 54% would discard these four foods based on the date. And the piece that was most striking to me was that for breakfast cereal, 43% said they were discarded based on the date. So, we've got some education to do. Yeah. In the earlier paper I did with colleagues at Cornell, we used breakfast cereal and we were surprised to see how much people willing to throw away breakfast cereal if it were passed to date. There is confirmation and we see this happen in many other products. And we'll definitely talk about some of those product differences with Ruiqing. The last question I'd like to ask you is you found that many consumers thought they knew the meanings of the various food date labels, but they were incorrect. And in some of the work that you've done in the past, you found that many people answered incorrectly even after viewing information about the labels. So even when you educated folks or gave people information, they still made incorrect choices. Why do you think this is, and what should we do about it? And some people's responses do improve when you show them the information, but it was striking in that study that seconds after having read the definition, according to the voluntary industry standard, people were giving the wrong answer. Even though they had previously said that they thought they understood it. So, to me, this suggests that they already think they know the answer and so they're not tuning in. And this speaks to a real challenge that we're going to have when we do standardize these date labels. How are we going to reach people and capture their attention. Like, if we just change the policy, that does nothing. We've got to reach people and we've got to do it in a sophisticated and well-planned way. And I think the education should also emphasize that misunderstandings are common because that might be something that would help wake people up. But beyond that, we've got to capture their attention. So, you know, dancing clowns, whatever it is that wakes people up. I have a fear of clowns, so I'm not sure if I want that as a policy recommendation. However... For the deli meats we want you to be afraid, so it's okay. Yes, I agree. I agree. One of the things that this conversation has helped us see is that there's some real concerns around whether or not people are paying attention to the label. Or there may be paying more attention to the dates. And even when people are taught or encouraged to think about the dates, there seems to be a mismatch. And Ruiqing, I want to now turn to you because one of the things in the study that we were a part of, there's some questions about differences among people. So, in the paper that we recently published on the relationship between date labels and anticipated food waste, and people's individual orientation to risk and loss, can you tell us a little bit about what some of the key findings of that paper are? Right. So, the paper is published recently in Applied Economics Perspective Policy. It's one of the official journals of Agricultural and Applied Economics Association (AAEA). Norbert is the leading author. So, this paper built on the framework of prospect theory and is based on the data from a series of experiments we conducted in Alabama and also the state of New York. We find that consumers do adjust their anticipated food waste by date labels and by how much they tolerate risk and losses. In the experiment, we particularly measured their tolerance to risk and losses. We found that the 'Use By' date labels tend to lead to more anticipated food waste than 'Best Buy'. Maybe this echo what Roni has said. So, people may tend to link 'Use By' with quality and food safety. We also found that the consumers with low tolerance to losses and are associated with higher anticipated foot waste regardless of date labels and the products. So, we can see a heterogeneity of the responses of different consumers to date labels and food items based on their tolerance to losses and risks. Thank you for that. And I think this is a really important aspect of looking at this set of studies because we see that people are different. They respond differently. And they have different ideas about how they handle losses. This idea that it can be worse to lose a hundred dollars versus to gain a hundred dollars. Or the way we understand how we'll negatively respond versus how positively we respond. Using this economic framework of prospect theory, something that is drawn from actually the psychology literature to better understand how people react to food labels while shopping. What are some key features of this approach to explaining people's behaviors and why do you think it's a good choice? Why do you think it's important to do this? One of the key features of prospect theory is it divides the possible outcomes of a risky event into two domains. One is a gain domain and one is a loss domain. So, in terms of the food consumption, probably the most likely status quo is do not eat the food items. So, the gain domain might be gaining nutrition from the food item. The loss domain might be the loss of health if the food item is bad. So, I think this framework fits particularly well to describe the consumer's trade off in their mind when they face a food item with a date label that is maybe one day or two days past the expiration date. So, one possibility is you consume this food. If it is good, you get nutrition and if it is bad, you potentially get lost health or lose one day of work or so on. So, I think this model can capture the trade off or the decision-making procedure in a consumer's mind pretty well. And experiments data support the theoretical prediction that loss aversion may affect people's food waste decisions. Thank you for that. And I think what's one of the sort of take home messages that I've learned out of this process is this heterogeneity, the fact that people are different and may respond differently to these date labels, really does put the onus upon policymakers to think critically what date labels, if we were to use them, or if we think they have an effect, which are the right ones. And so I actually want to open up the question to all of you. In your view, what next steps make sense for date labels to help address the food waste challenges that we see in this country? Let's start with you, Brian. Ooh, yeah. So, to me a compelling issue that needs to be addressed is how do we get 'Use By' to really translate to be people to be about safety? Is it a different color? I know we don't want to mess with the phrases, but do we just call this safety date and put it in red or put a clown by it if that scares you. Something along those lines to make that stand out. And then on the relevance side, I think it might be out of policy, but perhaps, industry collaboration to really push printed dates to the end of that quality horizon. So that everybody has confidence that they're not going to get undercut by somebody else having an earlier date printed for cereals or for canned goods or something like that. To have a kind of a truce among commercial interests to say, okay, typically canned beans, has this type of 180 days or 360 days. Let's push it to the end of that acceptable horizon so that we don't have unwarranted waste happening as often. Those are two ideas that I've kind of chewed on a lot and think could be positive steps forward. But I'm fascinated to hear what others think. Thank you, Brian and I really don't like the idea of putting clowns anywhere near this. I want to go to you, Roni. All right, well first, I'll a thousand percent echo everything that Brian just said. And I'll note also in terms of the 'Use By' date, the label that was most commonly associated with food safety was 'Expires On' by consumers. But that isn't part of what has been under [policy] discussion. But anyway, in addition to echoing that, I'll just say we do need a standardized policy and it has to be accompanied by a well-designed education campaign. And this policy change, it's just a no-brainer. It's not controversial. It's fairly minimal cost. And given the high food prices and the struggles that consumers are having right now, they need every tool that they can to save money and food, and this is one of them. Great. Thank you, Roni. I'll give the last word to you, Ruiqing. Yeah. I will echo what Brian and Roni said. So, a well-designed policy and public education campaign. Particularly for the education campaign. I think regardless of if there is a policy change or not, I think it is time to do a public education campaign. Norbert, we have done the research on food waste for almost nine years, right? So, I learned a little bit about the date label's meaning. But still, I cannot change my wife's opinion. When she sees sell by yesterday for the milk, she would suggest we throw it away. But I said this is not for us, this is for sellers. But she wouldn't believe so because I cannot persuade her. But maybe an education campaign from more authoritative institutional federal government can change people's mind as a researcher or like even husband cannot change. Roni - And can I just add to that, just please. I think that the economics and psychology expertise that all of you have can really contribute to that. Because I think that's a really important point that you're making. And it's not just factual, it's emotional too. And so how do we, you know, get in there and change what people do beyond their knowledge? Bios Roni Neff is a Professor at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health's Department of Environmental Health & Engineering and the Johns Hopkins Center for a Livable Future, an academic center focused on food systems and public health. Her research focuses on wasted food through the lens of equity and public health. She is a co-Director of the RECIPES national food waste research network, and she recently served on the National Academies of Science and Medicine consensus panel on consumer food waste. Brian Roe is the Van Buren Professor in the Department of Agricultural, Environmental and Development Economics at Ohio State University. Roe has worked broadly in the areas of agricultural and environmental economics focusing on issues including agricultural marketing, information policy, behavioral economics and product quality. He was recently named as a fellow of the Agricultural and Applied Economics Association and has previously served as an editor for the Association's flagship journal, the American Journal of Agricultural Economics. He currently leads the Ohio State Food Waste Collaborative, a collection of researchers, practitioners, and students working together to promote the reduction and redirection of food waste as an integral part of a healthy and sustainable food system, and co-leads the RECIPES Network, a National Science Foundation Sustainable Regional System's Research Network focused on increasing food system sustainability, resilience and equity by addressing the issue of food waste.  In addition to research on food waste, his other recent research includes a USDA funded project focused on local foods and school lunch programs and participation in an NSF-funded multidisciplinary team seeking to understand human-ecosystem feedbacks in the Western Lake Erie basin, including understanding how farms and agribusinesses respond to voluntary environmental programs and how Ohio residents respond to different options to manage Lake Erie water quality. Ruiqing Miao is an agricultural economist at Auburn University. Miao is interested in sustainability, innovation, and decision-making. His research focuses on the interaction between agricultural production and its environment, aiming to understand and quantify 1) agriculture's impact on land use, water use, water quality, and biodiversity, and 2) how agricultural production is affected by farmers' behaviors, public policies, agricultural innovation, technology adoption, and climate change.

The food system is extremely inefficient with  237 million tons going unsold or uneaten.--becomingfood waste, which goes t to landfill, incineration, or down the drain, or  simply left in the fields to rot.  That's almost 120 billion meals' worth of food that goes unsold or uneaten each year, roughly 1.4% of U.S. GDP. The impacts  on  climate and environment are also enormoussince food that is never eaten still requires resources to grow, harvest, transport, cool, cook or otherwise prepare—even when it ends up in land fills. Minnie Ringland is the Manager of Climate & Insights for www.reFed.org. Farm To Table Talk has been named one of the top farming podcasts:https://podcast.feedspot.com/farming_podcasts/

This episode's guest is Eva Goulbourne, founder of Littlefoot Ventures and one of the most insightful voices at the intersection of food, climate, and finance. Eva's career has taken her from the halls of the World Economic Forum to the launch of ReFED, where she helped build one of the most influential organizations in food waste reduction. Through her work at Littlefoot, she advises brands, foundations, and startups on how to drive meaningful change across our global food system. She's also the host of the new podcast Everything but the Carbon Sink, where she dives deep into the tough, often-overlooked challenges facing the future of food. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

New findings from a 2025 national survey reveal that U.S. consumers are discarding food near or past the printed date even more frequently than in 2016.

I don't know about you and your household, but in my home, we have a long history of opening the refrigerator and discovering pasta sauce or mayonnaise that we don't remember when it was put in the refrigerator, when we last opened it, and we're confused. We open the container; we smell it; we check out the date label. And if we're confused, we have a mantra: when in doubt, throw it out. But aren't those date labels supposed to help us make good decisions about whether or not a food product is safe? Currently, there is no federal regulation on what those labels should say. Best Buy, Use Buy, Sell Buy, or what have you. However, there is legislation in the Congress called the Food Date Labeling Act to help us address this issue. And today's guest, Regina Harmon, will help us explore this particular issue. She is the executive director of the Food Recovery Network, the largest student led movement fighting food waste and hunger in the United States. Interview Summary First, some of our listeners may not be familiar with the Food Recovery Network. Could you tell us more about the organization and what it hopes to accomplish? Absolutely. Thank you so much. Food Recovery Network was started in 2011 by college students at the University of Maryland who saw a couple of things happening. They saw a lot of food waste on their college campus, and they also saw a lot of people who were experiencing hunger in their communities. And so, they thought, hey, instead of throwing this perfectly good food away, what we could do is package this food up and give it to those in our neighborhood that we know need some help. And that's how Food Recovery Network was started. They started at the University of Maryland, one dining hall, one carload of food. They started calling other friends that went to different colleges and universities across the United States. And over the last decade and some change, we've grown into, as you said, the largest movement of students who are fighting food waste and hunger. We have about 200 college campuses that have food recovery network chapters. We've recovered over 16 million pounds of food through the power of young people. And today we also help other sectors that would like to also do the right thing with their surplus food. We help farms, we help corporate events, large scale events, we help conferences. You name it, wherever there's surplus food, Food Recovery Network can help make sure that food doesn't go into landfill and helps feed those in need. I would love to hear a little bit about who you are able to serve through the Recovered Food. Are you working with food banks? Are you working with the pantries directly? Tell me a little more about that connection. It's a beautiful connection. We have about 400 nonprofits all over the United States. That directly receive the surplus food that we donate. We go to the sites where the food is. So again, in college dining halls, large scale events, you name it, and that food is packaged up safely. And then it's brought to what we call hunger fighting nonprofits. These are nonprofits on the front lines in all of our communities that are in some way feeding our neighbors in need. These are homeless shelters, soup kitchens, food banks. These are domestic violence shelters. These are afterschool programs, churches, anywhere that can also handle the food safely and then distribute it to our neighbors directly. So through that, we've been able to meet so many incredible people, and a lot of times volunteers themselves who work at these incredible locations that again, are just helping those who need support to make their ends meet. Great. This is really important work. Thank you so much for the work that you all are doing. So, how does the Food Recovery Network activate to end food waste and make a positive impact on the environment? There's a lot of things that are happening here. You know, millions of tons of food is wasted every single year. And I know we'll get into the Food Date Limiting Act in just a moment, but every part of our food system, there's food waste. On farm fields, during transportation, at supermarkets, in our own homes. And so, a lot of times, most of the time, the majority of the time, all of the food that is wasted is actually thrown into landfills. You know, we see those images of whole entire tractor trailer trucks of food being dumped into landfill. And that is the problem. The majority of food, much of which is still perfectly good to eat, perfectly good to consume, is being driven into landfill, where it then is covered up, it begins to rot, and this is where the environmental harm starts. The food rots, and it creates additional CO2 into our environment and other greenhouse gases that is really difficult for our environment to reabsorb because it's happening at such an increased rate. And that is directly causing what we now know as global warming. Food all across the United States, all across the globe, is the third largest emitter of CO2 gases. And so that is the environmental issue that Food Recovery Network is addressing. It's directly harming our atmosphere. But then when we take that step back and we think about all the water it took to grow these plants, all the fuel it took to transport the food, all the fertilizer it took to put into the soil. All of those precious resources are also wasted, and we need to reclaim those resources year after year after year for food that ultimately we are going to throw away, have it cause harm by rotting and going into our atmosphere in the form of CO2 gas. So, it is a really disturbing cycle. Our mission is to recover surplus food to feed everyone who is hungry so that precious food isn't going into landfill unnecessarily and causing all of that environmental harm. Yes, this is what I find really critical about the work that you all are doing because of the greenhouse gas emissions from decomposing food and landfills is really problematic, but I'm so grateful for the way you talked about how there are losses, if you will, all along the supply chain from on the farm to the final consumer. I remember even talking to a farmer in Virginia who said, it really breaks his heart to see food wasted. He put a lot of effort, his blood, sweat and tears into that production to see it wasted was just disappointing. And that's going beyond the environmental costs to just thinking about the value of someone's labor. I really appreciate what you all are trying to accomplish. But it sounds like you all are involved in the day-to-day work of preventing it from going into the landfill and trying to get into the hands of people. How is it that you all are involved in policy? I'd love to hear how you all are thinking about date labeling and the law that is in the Congress to try to address this challenge. Thank you so much, Norbert, for that question, because, yes, we are here to feed people through recovering food and donating it and helping our neighbors and being in community with our neighbors. That absolutely must happen. There's 47 million people who are food insecure all across the United States. We all know somebody who is food insecure. We might not know it. But we do. 47 million people. So that act of not wasting our precious food and bringing it back further into community is vital. And then at the same time, Food Recovery Network, we are involved in advocacy to begin to correct a system that allows for this food waste and food loss. At the policy level is where we can really begin to recapture all of this precious food that our incredible farmers across the United States are growing for all of us. So, we got involved with the Food Date Labeling Act several years ago, and it has, you know, come up in our Congress a few different times. And we see this as a beautiful way to help reduce confusion around why food is being wasted in the first place. And in particular at the consumer level - our homes. You know, 80 percent of households at some point, they're going to be confused because of a date label. Again, your story emphasized that so wonderfully because it's something that we've all experienced. About 80 percent of homes are having those same kinds of conversations. The majority of people do believe that date labels are already standardized, and lo and behold, they are not. And so, what we're trying to do, we're lending our voice to support the Food Date Labeling Act, so that we can begin to standardize these date labels. And then prevent millions of tons of food from going to waste in the future every single year unnecessarily. This is the way that I can imagine doing the work that you all are doing, not just on the physical movement of food, but also thinking about the policies that can help support the work that you're doing. It takes sort of that broad spectrum of approaches to really affect this challenge. But I've got to ask, and I hear your passion. I hear your great concern. Can you help us understand why the urgency now? Why, why try to find a permanent solution to food waste today? What's the impetus? You're absolutely right, Norbert. The time is now. We are getting many messages. I will speak from the perspective of our students. So, this is Gen Z, Gen X, Millennials, you know, young people that are on the front lines of this movement to say, we can no longer waste precious food. We were all born [00:10:00] into millions of people being food insecure. That's wrong. And we know that we can do something about that. We have the simple solution of at least redirecting our precious food to help those in need. So that urgency is now. People are hungry right now. And we have our chapters all across the United States that are doing a food recovery right now. At some point in the day, there's somebody who is doing the right thing to help say, I can help feed my neighbors in need. There's nothing more urgent than that. We know all the hardships that come with being food insecure. And then when we think about our planet. That urgency is now. I tell people all the time if we can all get on board together in this wonderful community to say, we don't need to waste food any longer. We have the solutions to no longer throw away precious food, and we can begin to, as you said earlier, I love this. To keep that value of the food every single step in the process from seedling to going into our mouths. If we can keep the value of that food, we can really reduce food going into landfill unnecessarily. And then when we can begin to think about that as how we view food, you know, what other problems can we solve together to make our communities thrive for one another? But in particular with the environment, the time is now. Our food waste is causing environmental harm. We can mitigate that environmental harm by stopping this dizzying, disturbing cycle of wasting food. We're wasting our potable water. We're wasting our fertilizer. We're wasting fuel, gasoline through transportation. And then this food is rotting and it is causing environmental harm, which is going into a larger, broader system of our storms are worse. Our storms are longer. They're starting earlier. They're ending later. They're in places that they weren't before. This is all part of. the environment that we can help to stem the tide of what we are experiencing as a species. So that's another reason why the immediacy is now. Let's not make this worse for the young folks in our lives. Let's not make this worse for the people who have yet to be born. We can do something now. This podcast is co sponsored by the Recipes Food Waste Research Network project led by American University and funded by the National Science Foundation. Bio Regina Harmon has been the Executive Director of Food Recovery Network since 2015 and has been a pivotal voice in raising awareness and harnessing action to reduce food waste, end hunger, and positively impact the environment. She has been invited to share her insights with media outlets such as CNN and Al Jazeera and was recognized as one of the most influential leaders in the food industry by SELF magazine and Food Tank. Apart from her position at Food Recovery Network, Regina is also a board member of Food Tank and Earth Island Institute, serves on ReFED's Advisory Council, and is a member of the Philadelphia artists' collaborative Pink Noise Projects. Regina emphasizes the need to address the racial disparities in the food system that disproportionately affect the health and economic outcomes of Black, Latinx/Latine, and Native American communities, highlighting the importance of working together to bring about change. Regina holds an MA in Literary and Cultural Studies from Carnegie Mellon University and a BA in English Literature from the University of Maine at Augusta.

“If you imagine that all of our country's surplus food is grown in one place, this mega-farm would cover an area the size of California and New York combined," says ReFED's Minnie Ringland.

“Radically inefficient” is an uncomfortable phrase when used to describe our United States food system, but it is what is being used by ReFED, a U.S.-based nonprofit working to pinch off food waste.

While the U.S. is, on the whole, a wealthy country, currently one in eight Americans is food insecure. Meanwhile, more than a third of food produced goes uneaten or unsold. That's roughly 90 million pounds according to ReFED, a research and advocacy group focused on eliminating food waste. Most of that food ends up in landfills where it becomes a big contributor to climate change because of the huge amounts of methane gas that are released as it decomposes. Is there a way to solve these two problems together by simply using the food surplus to feed more people instead of sending it to landfills? ReFED President Dana Gunders joins The Excerpt to dig into this meaty issue. See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

On this episode of “Food Talk with Dani Nierenberg,” Dani sits down with Dr. Marion Nestle, an author, nutritionist and the Paulette Goddard Professor of Nutrition, Food Studies, and Public Health, Emerita, at New York University and Dr. Dariush Mozaffarian, a cardiologist and the Director of the Food is Medicine Institute at the Friedman School at Tufts University for a conversation about Food is Medicine. During the fireside chat, they dive into how effectively the U.S. healthcare system can help us address food and nutrition security through Food is Medicine programs, the politicization of the Dietary Guidelines for Americans, and the latest class of weight-loss drugs known as GLP-1s.  This conversation was part of a Summit at Climate Week NYC hosted by Food Tank, Flashfood, ReFED, Apeel, and Divert.  While you're listening, subscribe, rate, and review the show; it would mean the world to us to have your feedback. You can listen to “Food Talk with Dani Nierenberg” wherever you consume your podcasts.

In this episode, we sit down with Dana Gunders, President of ReFED and a renowned expert in food sustainability. Dana shares her path into the food waste sector, emphasizing the critical environmental and economic impacts of food waste. Under her leadership, ReFED has achieved remarkable milestones, such as a 25% reduction in surplus food among West Coast grocers, and has spearheaded innovative strategies. These include AI-enhanced demand planning, advanced markdown apps, and dynamic employee-driven initiatives. We explore how these efforts intersect with broader climate change policies and discuss both the potential economic benefits and the challenges ahead. Dana emphasizes the vital roles of public awareness and private sector engagement in reaching the ambitious goal of cutting food waste by 50% by 2030. Join us for a compelling conversation about transforming food waste challenges into opportunities for greater sustainability. About Dana Gunders Deemed "the woman who helped start the waste-free movement" by Consumer Reports, Dana Gunders is a national expert who has dedicated her career to helping industry, policymakers, and consumers activate solutions to reduce food waste. Her landmark 2012 report "Wasted: How America is Losing Up to 40% of Its Food from Farm to Fork to Landfill" sparked a national dialogue about the consequences of food waste, and since then, she has continued to bring the issue to a wider audience through testimony before Congress, her Waste-Free Kitchen Handbook, and appearances in media such as The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Bloomberg, Times Magazine, Fox News, Teen Vogue, PBS Newshour, and hundreds of other outlets. Before joining ReFED in 2019, she served as a founding Board member for the organization. When not worrying about it professionally, Dana spends far too much time convincing her two young kids to eat broccoli stalks and reinventing their uneaten lunches as family dinner. Timestamps: 00:00 Introduction to the Podcast 00:25 Meet Dana Gunders: Food Sustainability Expert 01:36 Dana's Journey into Food Waste Management 03:34 The Birth of ReFed 05:02 ReFed's Mission and Achievements 10:49 Innovations in Food Waste Reduction 14:45 Consumer Awareness and Behavioral Change 18:40 Food Waste and Climate Change 23:01 Economic Implications of Food Waste 26:21 Food Security and Food Waste 27:57 The U.S. Food Waste Pact 33:19 Challenges and Solutions in Reducing Food Waste 38:13 Personal and Professional Insights on Food Waste 43:47 Innovations and Future Directions 46:05 Conclusion and Final Thoughts

In this episode, Clancy speaks with Vanessa Mukhebi and Selena Mao. Vanessa Mukhebi is a global nomad, storyteller, food anthropologist, and professional troublemaker who is the Communications Manager of ReFED while Selena Mao serves as the Manager of Research and Insights, developing information and accompanying technical products to reduce food loss and waste. You won't want to miss their discussion about food racies, food apartheid, redlining, and injustices that create health inequity in the U.S. Enjoy the show!

When you hear university dining, you likely have images in your mind of college students with trays and hand waiting in a line for a meal in a dining hall. You may even think of a food court or a trendy food hall in the cool part of town. But there is so much more happening behind the scenes. Today we will learn about Menus of Change University Research Collaborative, MCURC for short, which is a nationwide network of colleges and universities using campus dining halls as living laboratories for behavior change. The Collaborative's goals are to move people towards healthier, more sustainable and delicious foods using evidence-based research, education and innovation. Our guest today is the Collaborative's co-founder and co-director, Stanford University's Sophie Egan.  Interview Summary I'd like you to tell our listeners a little bit more about the Menus of Change University Research Collaborative. What is it and how does it actually work? The Menus of Change University Research Collaborative was co-founded by the Culinary Institute of America and Stanford University, two divisions there, the Stanford Prevention Research Center and the School of Medicine, and Residential and Dining Enterprises. And that should tell you something is different in our vision, which is that first and foremost, we wanted to break down silos that exist on campuses between experts in food who work in academic realms. So, researchers, faculty who may be studying food, either from one certain discipline or ideally some cases transdisciplinarily, and those who actually feed students, the experts in the dining programs on campus. And Stanford was a good place to co-found this because of this great partnership that already existed between the dining program and between Dr. Christopher Gardner at the School of Medicine. But that model has actually now been replicated. We are at 70 plus institutions, not only across the U.S., but actually increasingly internationally. In addition to fostering that collaboration and breaking down those silos on a given campus, we really wanted to foster collaboration between universities to take what we consider kind of a plug-and-play research protocol. You know, a given design of a study that, as you said, uses campus dining halls as living laboratories and actually replicate research. So that's what we've done. It's been incredibly fun to be part of it from the beginning, and it's been incredibly exciting and impactful because of the approach that we take. We really democratize even what it means to be a researcher, to be involved in research. We have involvement in the collaborative and in research projects from students, faculty, of course, who are critical in their expertise, but also executive chefs, nutrition and sustainability experts. And many other research collaborators who are mission aligned organizations like EAT and REFED and Food for Climate League, who bring their own kind of comparable expertise. And we all work together to shape these living lab studies and then to test those at multiple sites to see if this a more generalizable effect? Or is that something just those west coast schools work for? Or is this only something that, you know, more elite schools where students of a certain demographic really respond? But that's also the beauty is the diversity of the institutions that we have. Geographically, public private, small and large. And we're really brought together by the kind of common language of what's also in our name, Menus of Change. And these are these principles of optimizing both human and planetary health through the food on our plates. And for us really, especially through students, changing that trajectory and cultivating the long term wellbeing of all people in the planet, one student, one meal at a time. Wow. This sounds like a really amazing program. And I love the fact that you're working across different types of universities across the U.S. and even outside. And it does make me believe that the findings that you have are applicable in a broader setting than if one institution does it. I can appreciate the power of the Collaborative. I want to know a little bit more about the impact of the collaborative. What has it been up to this point and in what ways have you seen this collaborative generate new ideas or new research findings? Yes. So, we've got about six peer reviewed publications under our belt with more on the way. Our latest is called the University Procurement and Planetary Health Study led by Dr. Jackie Bertoldo, who was at the Johns Hopkins University and also Stanford Food Institute. But we have a number of academic publications also in the works. And then importantly, we actually have produced 13 operational publications and reports. So, what that illustrates is that we've come to realize that those that are collaborating have different currencies. Publishing in a peer reviewed journal, that's what motivates academic researchers, right? That's what's going to enable them to invest time and resources. Fundamentally, this is primarily something that people do,  in their free time, right? It's a volunteer-based network of over 300 members. But if they're going to work on a project, it has to have some value to their own work. But what has value to those in dining operations is implementable, real, tangible strategies, recommendations, and guidelines that translate 'these are the findings of a certain study into what do you want me to do about it? How do you want me to change my menu, sourcing, the design of the dining hall, the choice architecture, right? The food environment itself. How do you want me to change something in the operational setup?' Maybe, if it has to do with food waste. All of these resources are on our website. We also have three really exciting new projects in the pipeline. So that's our research and publication impact to date. But I should say that importantly, it's much more meaningful to us who take those resources and acts upon them. We know that universities are unique places to conduct research, but our research is not aimed only at the campus dining sector. It's actually offered open source to inform and shape the entire food service industry. We have been thrilled, for example, one of our kind of flagship publications called the Edgy Veggies Toolkit has been implemented and adopted by some of the largest food service companies in the world. Think of Sodexo, Aramark, Compass, who are phenomenal members of the collaborative. Think of corporate dining programs, hospitals, hotels, elsewhere. K 12 environments. And that's, to us, the most important kind of reach is to know that those toolkits, those resources. Edgy Veggies was about how you could simply change the way you describe vegetable-based dishes on a menu, to use more taste focused language, to increase the appeal. We actually demonstrated you can measurably increase selection and consumption of vegetables. So, you can imagine that has applications in public health in countless settings. Even those of us trying to feed our kids. Hey, if I call tonight's broccoli, you know, zesty orange broccoli versus just broccoli, maybe my kid will eat more of it, right? So, it has applications in countless different contexts. Another really big area for us is our collective purchasing power. So, we learned at some point that it's not only that these organizations, the institutions that are part of the collaborative are brought together by a desire to co create research, but it's really that alignment on healthy, sustainable, plant forward future for the food service industry. And so we've actually created this collective impact initiative where it's our combined purchasing power. We've now measurably reduced our combined food-related greenhouse gas emissions. By 24 percent just between 2019 and 2022, and that's across 30 institutions, 90 million pounds of food. I mean, this is a huge outcome for us, and we're not stopping there. We had a goal to reduce by 25 percent by 2030, and now reaching that, we're A, enhancing the target to a 40 percent reduction by 2030. But importantly, we're actually measuring now the uptick in diet quality. So, because human health is equally important to that sustainability part, that University Procurement for Planetary Health study that I mentioned, we're actually able to see that if we are aligning our procurement, meaning what do we buy in the total pounds of an institution and then in the aggregate, right? How plant forward, how healthy and sustainable is that kind of portfolio, that total mix of foods that we're purchasing? And we can actually really increase the diet quality and that kind of average health profile at the same time. So, getting that data layer is really key. And it's the kind of area of impact that has so much momentum and will only continue into the future. Also, lastly, just to say our student engagement numbers have really grown, and that's critically important because educating and cultivating the next generation of food systems leaders. is also core to our work. We have our MCRC Fellows program and that has really grown to have about 30 fellows from a number of institutions all around the country. That's another great way that anyone interested can get involved in. Students are a reason for being. So, it's key that they see these ways to make an impact through their work as well. I am really impressed with the improvements in lowering greenhouse gas emissions or improving sustainability of the dining facilities. How actually did you all do that? I mean, it sounds like you're asking people to report and through that reporting, you see reduction? Can you explain? Coming soon is our 2.0 learnings report that will answer that exact question, but we do have a 2020 version. We call it the early learnings report that shares what it sounds, you know, the early learnings of what works, what doesn't. But what I can tell you can have been kind of the big keys to that success. First, collective target setting. We have been able to welcome institutions that really don't necessarily have the political support, the kind of stakeholder buy in, to make a big public commitment. Some schools do, some institutions do, and that's great. And others, they can sort of take cover, so to speak, in contributing to something where, you know. Their pace of change may be different. And so, it's really kind of contributing to something larger than only their institution, but also having the comfort that it's going to be fits and starts. It may not be linear. It may not be all forward. It might be a little bit backward in terms of the progress trajectory. So that's been really key to having a real diversity of schools where it's not only those that are at the very leading edge. And it's in again, places that aren't as comfortable coming out with a big splashy public wedge. The other big thing that's been key is that we have created a very streamlined framework for data collection. Instead of kind of saying you must submit your data for every single item you've ever purchased, we've on a smaller subset of food categories, where it's easier for them to track, we've created a streamlined and standardized template for them to submit the data, and we also provide individualized reports back to that university. It's confidential. They are the only one who gets it. And that's very motivating because a lot of institutions don't have that resource or that expertise to conduct that analysis to track their emissions year over year. It's almost like getting kind of a free consultancy. But it's what creates that reciprocity where we need their data. We need their collective contribution to the collective effort. And they're getting something out of it because they do have to take the time to find the data and to submit it to us. And then the other thing I think has really been key is, and this was kind of the core concept of collective impact, is continuously iterating. Every year we're listening to those involved in tweaking, you know, how we're asking for the data, how frequently we used to ask for it twice a year, and now it's annually, for example. So always kind of iterating, testing and iterating to make the processes mutually beneficial as possible. And then also keeping the door open for those other institutions to join. It's kind of a cohort effect where we have some institutions that have been part of it from the beginning and others that have only been submitting data for a year and everyone is playing a role. Great. Thank you for sharing that. I want to ask you a little bit more about your other work that you're doing because you're the co-director of the collaborative. You're also the co-director of the Stanford Food Institute. Can you tell our listeners more about that institute and what you're working on there? The Stanford Food Institute was founded by our visionary leader, Dr. Shirley Everett, who's Senior Vice Provost for Residential Dining Enterprises at Stanford. And she really had this vision to bring together an entire community of people to shape a better future of food for the benefit of all humanity and, and really embracing how much food is happening on the Stanford campus. To have the Stanford Food Institute be really this hub and this home for what belovedly we say at Stanford, it's a very decentralized place. There's a ton of entrepreneurial spirit and that's fantastic and should be, but often we don't know what everyone else is doing. So, it's a great opportunity for the Stanford Food Institute to be that magnet and say, come one, come all, whatever student led group, research project, course, event, you know, we want to work with you. So, in practice, what we really do is we work across research, education and innovation to bring together that community and work on this better future. We have a really strong focus on racial equity in the food system, as well as bold climate action. Those are kind of some cross-cutting themes. Our R&DE (research, development, education) core values that have to do with excellence and students first, sustainability, health, deliciousness. All of those things are kind of foundational at the same time. So we actually collaborate with faculty in all seven schools, which is for me super fun because I get to learn about the business dimensions of food and the psychology and social sciences. We have the new Stanford Doerr School of Sustainability that is a very active partner. We have phenomenal partners in the School of Medicine. And when possible, of course, we bring them all together. One really phenomenal culmination of all of those different research efforts is we host something called the Stanford Food Institute Food Systems Symposium, where every year, I like to explain it as a food systems science fair. It's a kind of exhibition style showcase. Researchers get really creative with how they show their work. We had over a hundred researchers at our latest symposium. And it demonstrates that real diversity of disciplines and topics that, that touch food because that's what's so exciting about food. It touches all parts of society. That's one big example. And then we have a number of community partnerships in the Bay Area. One is with the nonprofit Farms to Grow and we're really committed long term to helping support black farmers, not only in California, but sharing our model for increasing supplier diversity and equitable supply chains with other institutions. So those are just two examples, but it's really such a pleasure and an honor to lead the Stanford Food Institute. And as you can likely gather, it's really quite complimentary to the menus of change university research collaborative as well. I am really excited to learn about this symposium. And I got to say, I've worked in land grant institutions before, and I studied at land grant institutions. And so it's interesting to hear of a school like Stanford that is not a land grant. That doesn't have a tradition of agriculture in a narrowly defined sense engaging in this work. I mean, how is it that you're able to find that many people? You said a hundred folks were working on different projects related to the food system. Is it just happening, and people don't necessarily know that it's happening and you're able to bring them together? What's going on there? That's a good question. I don't have a scientific answer. I have a hunch. Anecdotal evidence. We're talking about research here. So, I've got to be clear on my methods for answering. I'll tell you, Norbert, so before I was in this role, one of the things I did was I taught a class at Stanford in the School of Design that was all about food systems careers. And it was essentially a stopgap because there was so much interest from undergraduate students in careers in food systems. But they didn't know what on earth they were going to do to make money, to make a living. How were they going to tell their parents I'm going to use all this money you spent on my degree to do what exactly? There also was just not a clear sense of even what the role types were. What's out there? What's possible? How can I make a difference? And so that class that we co-taught for several years. And I say that because that was just an interesting signal of how many students were interested, sort of, you know, poking at the edges. But a lot of them, to be honest, I call it off ramping. They didn't see the path. They just went the path that was more clear cut. They went to law school or they went to med school. And then they said, ‘well, I'll just like cook at home as a side hobby instead. Because maybe my passion for food doesn't need to be my career.' And so I think what we're really doing with the Food Institute, and there's a number of other kind of similar initiatives, is trying to say, let's try to, you know, address this in a more root cause kind of way. We have something now called the Stanford Food Systems Community, which is just a list serve. And in the fall, we host an event right at the beginning of the year where it's, it's kind of a, again, a come one, come all. We come to the farm, the actual farm at Stanford and have a pizza party and get to know all the different events and things on campus. I think to me, it's, it's a groundswell that's happening nationwide. So, I'm also an author and I've spoken for my books at a lot of universities. And I will often get asked to speak to the career services department. They'll ask me, can you talk about careers in food systems? I've seen this groundswell of interest from students. And then I think a lot of faculty also are really seeing how maybe they study law or a certain dimension. But its kind of either like backs into food or stumbles upon food, maybe. You know, we don't have, like you're saying, we don't have a department in nutrition. I mean, we don't have a specifically food kind of academic framework. But it's more those inherent intersectionalities with food where it's almost in, I think, inescapable to faculty. And then it's really kind of bolstered by how many students are expressing interest. It's something I'm really excited to see where we're in conversations with faculty to do even more to just make students aware of how many classes there are. Because I think sometimes that is the challenge that it's there, but they just don't know how to access it. Right. Thank you for sharing that. And I got to say, I've been taking notes, so I may follow up with you some more later. You've been working with campus food leaders for over a decade now. And you talked about that even in, I guess, in referencing the class as well. What is it about colleges and universities that excite you when it comes to making positive changes in the food system? And you've given me a little bit about that. I'm intrigued to see what else are you seeing? You know, it's surprising. It's the longest I've done something, like a certain one specific role is, is co leading this collaborative. Because I actually co-founded it when I was with the Culinary Institute of America on the other side of the partnership. And I think I have just a deep appreciation, and maybe I like to describe myself as an I realist, idealist mixed with a realist. A realistic view of the potential for universities to be change agents in society. Does it mean they always use that potential? No, but it's there. It's everything from the incubators of new knowledge. They're where new ideas emerge, right? I remember when I first went to the University of Bologna, and it's been there for a thousand years. That's just incredible, right? But it's also a place of growth and expanding your mind for students. Many of these higher education institutions are what's been referred to as anchor institutions. They are huge employers in a region. They are huge thought leaders in a region. They're places of opportunity for all kinds of different things. Whether it's collaborations with private sector and industry, whether it's international kind of tourism and exposure, I mean, so many different possibilities there. And I think the other big thing is that, and I should just say on the anchor institution point, it's the, all that purchasing power too, that I mentioned right there. Very streamlined, fairly agile decision making. I'm sure someone on the podcast is going to say, you think Higher Ed is agile, you know. There's bureaucracy, I know, but I just mean compared to some other food service companies or industries where it's really hard to make changes within campus dining, in particular, you do have a fairly sizable, you know, amount of purchasing power that can have fairly quick, they can be early adopters and they're known as early adopters. The food service industry really looks at what's campus dining doing. That's the tip of the spear. That's a signal of the trends to come. That's a signal of what are going to be the new norms. And the last thing is that we really embrace the fact that students in college, this is this unique period of identity formation. They're figuring out their relationships to food. What is the role that food is going to play in their lives? What do they value? How does that get reflected through food? How does that make them feel? How do they perform academically, physically, et cetera? And of course, for community and belonging, coming together, breaking bread, et cetera. We really love this stat where we've seen that in a given year, we have 4 million meals across the collaborative. But it's not just the meals that these students eat when they're on our campuses. It's the billions of meals they will go on to consume in their collective lifetimes, and when they go on to be decision makers and parents and in the other future realms. And again, that shaping formative opportunity. There are many reasons, I guess, that I've been motivated and I think the potential is still just tremendous. I'm excited for all that's ahead. This is great. And I love the idea and the recognition that this is this formative time for students. That their taste, which may have been shaped, of course, from home, but are being transformed in the dining halls. The place where they're learning to step out and make decisions about food in a way that they couldn't even in high school. I really appreciate this idea and this opportunity. And I appreciate the sort of seriousness that you take at approaching this issue. I have to say, as someone who's related to or connected to a policy center, I am intrigued to think about what kind of policy initiatives, federal, state, even university, do you see coming out of the work of the collaborative? Well, you know, it's really exciting when there is, again, I mentioned that our schools are both public and private, right? So, policy has so many opportunities to kind of shape, again, that social or political will that the decision makers administrators, dining directors may have to pursue something. So, you know, the University of California has been part of the collaborative, most of their campuses have been part for a very long time. And it just is a good example, I think to me, where in that state, there is so much support from the governor's office for farm to fork, local procurement, direct procurement, supplier diversity, regenerative agriculture, climate friendly and plant forward meals in public schools, in K 12. It's that sort of enabling environment, I think, that policy can create and also learn from. So, if it sees constellation of institutions, making a bold move or all aligning on the same kind of, you know, targets or metrics, that can give them the wind at their backs to pass something that maybe applies to all publicly run institutions. Or all food vendors in their state. For example, I would love to see more policy efforts on data and reporting. As I shared with you about collective impact, we're really proud of what we've done, but this is all voluntary, right? We're just choosing to measure this and hold ourselves accountable and keep striving. But I think at some point if it becomes required, you could have more resources in these institutions being brought to do that hard work that is required. I mean, it's not only, you know, sharing with us, but then it's analyzing your menu. What were the strategies that led to that biggest reduction? How did the student feedback go? Working with suppliers is a huge area that Stanford's really excited to have begun, but it takes time. It's, and we need more support, more capacity to do that. I could envision that if there were more requirements kind of coming from policy for some of that tracking and disclosing. And an example that gives me reason to think that's possible is again in California. Something called SB 1383 requires Institutions like ours and all others to disclose their food donation amounts. And I think that's a really interesting example again of measuring something. Bring a measurement requirement from policy to something that maybe everyone's already been doing because it was just best practice, or something that they wanted to know for themselves again that more voluntary. I think there's a lot of opportunities to do more of that. And I would love to see more of those state and regional policies, but also some of these kind of best practices emerge from some of these states and counties that become perhaps nationwide. You know the old saying, if you don't measure it, you can't change it because you don't know. And I love the fact that the collaborative sees itself as a place to prototype, to figure out how do we collect these data. How do we make it less burdensome? Because if you can figure those things out, then I can imagine allowing others to replicate that. This is a great test bed for what policies could look like by the work that you all are doing, it sounds like. And I think that's a really important point because I think the fear would be that policies get created in a vacuum, right? Where you just say, we're going to require you to disclose XYZ crazy detailed things that either an entity doesn't know how to get, can't get, or it costs them thousands and thousands of dollars to collect, or something along those lines. And so, really marrying feasibility, sort of what measurement tools exist how is the kind of dynamic between humans in your environments and those technology tools? I mean, food waste measurement right now is an area that we're really focusing on that because AI and there's a huge opportunity to kind of reduce the burden on staff. But so far, it's been difficult for pretty much every food service operation, including campuses, to get really high-quality food waste data. Even though they may have these tools. And it often has to do with how difficult, how much time it requires staff. I think it's really key that policymakers really, yeah, work with institutions like ours. We love to be, as you said, that kind of prototyping place to find the right balance of rigor and frequency and volume of data with, again, kind of labor and financial constraints and operational realities. And for us, it's also critically important to keep in mind the student experience. How do we not do so many research projects in a four walled space so that we forget this is their home. This is where students eat and live every day. It can't only be about us getting as much data as possible, of course. It's just really accounting for all those variables in the equation. I appreciate this. And I swear, Sophie, we could talk forever. Let me ask you one last question. And I think this is a good place for us to come to an end. What are the different ways people can get involved in the Menus of Change University Research Collaborative? Excellent. Well, please do. So first, the easiest thing is just check out our website. Everything that we create is open source. As I mentioned, it for sure can be applied in university settings, but it pretty much across the board can be applied in a number of other settings. Food service, for sure, but also there's a lot of, whether it's prepared foods at retails, other settings in general. Check out moccollaborative. org in particular, our resources and research. The other way is if you're affiliated with an institution, if you're an academic researcher, and you can get in touch with us to find out about. Or you can become what we call a member institution where dining services and at least one academic researcher are involved. Then you're actually part of all that data collection kind of effort. I think the other biggest area is if you have students who are interested, if once you become a member institution, as I mentioned, there's tons of opportunities to get involved in shaping research. But also in the educational side, which is through our MCRC student fellows program. So those would be some of the big ones, and we always love feedback, too. Tell us how you're utilizing the resources and how we can continue to identify gaps in the research agenda that we are uniquely positioned to help fill. BIO Sophie Egan, MPH is the Director of the Stanford Food Institute and Sustainable Food Systems at R&DE Stanford Dining, Hospitality & Auxiliaries, where she is Co-Founder and Co-Director of the Menus of Change University Research Collaborative. She is also the author of How to Be a Conscious Eater (Workman, 2020)—named one of Bon Appétit's “Favorite New Books for Climate-Friendly Cooking and Life”—and the founder of Full Table Solutions, a consulting practice that's a catalyst for food systems transformation. An internationally recognized leader at the intersection of food, health, and climate, Sophie is also a contributor to The New York Times Health section and Director of Strategy for Food for Climate League. Previously, Sophie served as the Director of Health and Sustainability Leadership/Editorial Director for The Culinary Institute of America's Strategic Initiatives Group. Sophie's writing has been featured in The Washington Post, TIME, Parents, The Wall Street Journal, Bon Appétit, WIRED, EatingWell, Edible San Francisco, FoodTank, and Sunset. She is a member of the Food System 6 Advisory Board, James Beard Foundation Sustainability Advisory Council, and the Food Tank Academic Working Group. She holds a BA with honors in history from Stanford University; an MPH with a focus on health and social behavior from UC Berkeley; and a certificate from the Harvard Executive Education in Sustainability Leadership program.

Azolla Ventures invests in breakthroughs that could avert catastrophic climate change. They focus on ventures at the earliest stages, where risk and reward are highest. Their priority is impact first: every investment holds the potential for large-scale greenhouse gas reductions and a more just climate for all. Founded by Prime Coalition and enabled by catalytic capital, they seek out bold entrepreneurs from all corners and embrace opportunities outside of venture norms. Amy Duffuor is the co-founder and General Partner of Azolla Ventures. She is also a Managing Director at Prime Impact Fund, Azolla Ventures' predecessor vehicle. Her professional background spans business, finance, and impact across three continents. Amy has served as a board member for Azolla Ventures portfolio companies Heaten and Carbon Reform, as well as Prime Impact Fund portfolio companies Clean Crop Technologies, Noon Energy, and Ovipost. In addition, Amy serves on the board of the Northeast Clean Energy Council (NECEC); the Leadership Council of Activate, a nonprofit that empowers scientists to bring their research to market to address climate change; the Advisory Council of ReFED, a national nonprofit focused on food waste; and the Advisory Board of GreenTech Noir, a global community for Black people working in sustainability and climate tech. Show Notes: [01:16] -  Amy walks us through the co-founding of Azolla Ventures and how it began with the Prime Coalition and a mission to use catalytic capital to drive climate innovation.  [02:09] -  Catalytic capital is tax exempt, structurally patient and more flexible, and it can be used to de-risk technologies for downstream investors. [05:13] -  Azolla Ventures helps lessen risk through a unique funding model that combines both catalytic capital with more traditional venture capital. [07:04] -  They invest in pre-seed, seed, and Series A rounds in hardware based companies. Hardware requires a longer investing horizon. [07:26] -  There are three key evaluation investment criteria that underscore the importance of catalytic capital in their model. 1. Gigaton scale climate impact. 2. Additionality. 3. Attractiveness to downstream commercial capital. [12:26] -  There are often other investors investing alongside Azolla Ventures. They try to be thoughtful about how they put these syndicates together. [14:39] -  Amy talks about how Azolla sources potential investment partners.  [16:14] -  Azolla has a unique process that begins with a pitch to a member, then a full-team pitch, then it's time for the investment advisory committee who help with the last two steps of additionality and downstream funding. [20:09] -  Most companies raise rounds with 18 to 24 months of runway.  [21:34] -  First tip is to understand what stage your company is at and realize it may not be the right stage for venture capital. [22:43] -  Be confident about demonstrating your expertise but humble about what you don't know. [23:58] -  Be coachable and agile. [24:38] -  The driving motivation for Azolla is large-scale climate impact. [26:08] -  Challenges include the long investment horizon and capital intensity and the project financing valley of death. [29:05] -  Founders need to be commercially minded and focus on customers and partners towards the later stages. [29:53] -  Amy's advice is don't be so focused on the job, be focused on the skill sets that you're gaining. Links and Resources: Azolla Ventures Website Prime Coalition

More than 2 billion people, about a third of the world's population, face food insecurity. At the same time, a recent UN report estimated that more than 1 billion metric tons of food went to waste in 2022, enough to give each person facing hunger around the world more than one meal a day. Ali Rogin speaks with Dana Gunders, executive director of ReFED, to learn more. PBS NewsHour is supported by - https://www.pbs.org/newshour/about/funders

More than 2 billion people, about a third of the world's population, face food insecurity. At the same time, a recent UN report estimated that more than 1 billion metric tons of food went to waste in 2022, enough to give each person facing hunger around the world more than one meal a day. Ali Rogin speaks with Dana Gunders, executive director of ReFED, to learn more. PBS NewsHour is supported by - https://www.pbs.org/newshour/about/funders

More than 2 billion people, about a third of the world's population, face food insecurity. At the same time, a recent UN report estimated that more than 1 billion metric tons of food went to waste in 2022, enough to give each person facing hunger around the world more than one meal a day. Ali Rogin speaks with Dana Gunders, executive director of ReFED, to learn more. PBS NewsHour is supported by - https://www.pbs.org/newshour/about/funders

If people knew how much food they threw away each week, would they change their food-wasting ways? That's a question scientists explore in the 2023 State of Food Waste in America report. The research goal was to understand why and how households waste food, and what would motivate them to prevent food waste. In today's podcast, we'll talk with MITRE scientists Laura Leets and Grace Mika, members of a team who developed and launched the MITRE Food Waste Tracker app. This is a first of its kind app for households to log information about discarded food and learn ways to save money by reducing food waste. The Food Waste in America study team includes the Gallup Survey Company, researchers from the Ohio State University, the Harvard Law and Policy Clinic, ReFED, the Natural Resources Defense Council, and the World Wildlife Fund. Interview Summary   Laura, let's begin with you. Can you give us a quick overview of why MITRE focused on measuring food waste at the household level and the behaviors? Laura - In a general sense, Norbert, we know the United States waste 30 to 40% of our food, yet we do not know how much is wasted at the household level. We know that waste occurs along the entire farm to table supply chain, like approximately 15% with farms, 15% at manufacturing, about 20% at stores and restaurants and about 50% in the household. So, given that half the waste happens at the household level, it's important to measure it. If you can measure it, you can do something about it. Up to this point, people have not had an easy way to estimate their amount of food waste. So, to address this gap, not only did we develop a new way to measure household food waste and Grace will share more about that, but we also provided a baseline measurement of American household food waste. I would like to really dig in a little bit more. How much food do American households waste, and do you have a sense of what kinds of foods people are wasting? Laura - Let me start with the amount first. We found that the average American household wastes somewhere from 3 to 4.5 pounds per week. And there's two ways to measure household food waste. The first is you can focus on the edible or uneaten food. And with this measure, American households waste about on average three pounds per week. Second, you can add inedible food. So, that's your food scraps, your eggshells. And if you take edible plus inedible food together, then the American households wastes on average about 4.5 pounds per week. Let me give your listeners a couple analogies to understand that impact of that 3 to 4.5 pounds of household food waste. So, let's say we combine our own household food waste with everyone else's. The crop waste is large enough to cover the states of California and New York. From a personal perspective, imagine before every meal you scrape off 40% of the food on your plate. If you imagine that in each meal, you're going to start to understand that the current food waste is massive, and we're all contributing to it. So that's the measurement piece. I'm going to pass it over to Grace to discuss the types of food we're wasting. Grace - Americans are wasting a wide variety of foods in their homes, but the number one wasted food type is your fresh produce. So, that would be your fruits and your vegetables. I think this is really important to keep in mind, not only because, of course, fruits and vegetables are perishable, but when we think about healthy diets, many people in the nutrition space are encouraging fresh fruits and vegetables or fruits and vegetables in general. Ao this is a really important finding, and I'm excited to know this. But it's also important for our listeners to think a little bit more about this. Grace, I would like to learn a little bit more from you. Can you tell us more about the MITRE Food Waste Tracker, the app itself? Grace - I would be happy to. The MITRE Food Waste Tracker app is meant to be a tool for households who want to understand exactly what's going uneaten in their home. If you had asked me what exactly I ate yesterday and how much of that went into my trash can, I would have a really difficult time remembering an answer to that question. And that's for just yesterday, let alone multiple days or weeks ago. Not knowing what exactly goes uneaten would make it really challenging for me to cut back on that waste. So, to solve that problem, our team designed an app which allows for food waste to be logged in real-time. So, right as you're doing your meal prep or you're clearing off the dinner dishes or emptying your leftovers out from the fridge. And the app tracks details both about the food itself, like where you got that from and the food group that it belongs to, as well as where, why, and how the food was thrown away.   And you can also track how much waste was produced, and we encourage you to use your hand as a guide to estimate the volume of that waste. So, your closed fist is about the size of a cup of food and your thumb about the size of a tablespoon. The more that you use the app to track, the more you will reveal patterns in the way that you waste. Maybe you find out that you're optimistically shopping for vegetables that your toddlers at home are just not interested in eating. Or maybe you're serving up heaping platefuls at dinner time, but then find that you're not hungry to finish that meal. So learning this will empower you to make small changes in the way that you shop for, prepare and store food to make sure that as little as possible is going to waste.   And if you're money-minded like many Americans are, you might be especially interested in an app feature which estimates the cost savings that you would experience if you cut back on your waste. So less food in the trash means more money in your wallet and the savings really add up. The average American family spends over $1,500 on wasted food each year. And tracking with the app is fast and simple. For each food that you dispose, you would simply click on the icons that best describe your waste. It would be really easy to get the whole family, even your your kids involved in tracking and thinking about the food that's going into the bin. You've already touched on a few of these key findings about sort of the top foods that we end up wasting. Are there other findings that you would like to share with us? Grace - So there are two behaviors that really stood out when it came to producing food waste. The first is simply being willing to eat your leftovers. Personally, I get really excited about leftover nights. It means I get a good home cooked meal with almost no prep work that evening. A lot of us are already doing this. About a third of Americans incorporate leftovers into new dishes and about half of us frequently eat leftovers just as a meal by themselves. Those leftovers add up. We found that households who consistently throw their leftovers away are wasting nearly four times as much as households that eat those up. We also found that households' understanding of and behavior around date labels plays a significant role in their levels of waste. A lot of us don't really understand how little date labels actually mean, and how little they're standardized. Not too long ago I was cooking with a friend, and we were making dinner together and he smelled a bag of shredded cheese and he said, "Oh, this smells kind of funky, but it's not past his date." And he added it into the dish. You should actually be doing the exact opposite of that. You should trust your senses over the date label when it seems that something is spoiling. There are some dates that are meant to be safety indications, but the majority are just a manufacturer's best guess of when food will pass its peak quality. And frequently, thrown away past date food that has no signs of spoilage so this leads to wasting over twice as much food. It can be easy to feel helpless when it comes to wasting food, but it's surprisingly simple to take control over your waste As we mentioned before, if you're curious about what sorts of behaviors are leading to waste in your own home, we have an app for that. So, our latest version of the app has new features to help you understand your waste and even get a sense of how much money you could be saving if you cut back on your waste in your home. I highly encourage you to check that out. I've got to say I have done some work on date labels and have found this is an important area of consideration. But also, one where the modification of those date labels may actually help reduce food waste. I'm so happy to hear you talk about the sort of broader set of things that consumers can do to actually mitigate food waste in the household. You got into some of my own personal family issues around what do we do about leftovers, and I will not report this conversation to my family. So, thank you for that, Grace. Laura, I want to go back to you and ask about a big picture question. Why should our listeners reduce their household food waste? Laura - Norbert, I believe I can make a compelling case for that. This is a rare opportunity when making a small change can have a large positive impact. Let me explain the amazing cascading ripple effect that happens when we reduce our household food waste. We had Grace reminding us with the app, and the first benefit is financial. An average American household can save at least $1,500 a year or $125 a month by reducing food waste. So just focus on that personal financial benefit, and then understand the resulting ripple effects. That first ripple effect is going to impact the ecology. Most of us don't realize significant resources go into producing food. The USDA reminds us that 50% of our land in America is used for food production and 80% of our water is used to produce that food. When we reduce our food waste, we're recognizing food as this precious resource, and we are supporting our food production industry. This is really important because America is one of the top food producers in the world.   The next ripple effect impacts food security. Food security is part of national security. When you reduce your household food waste, you are also supporting national security. Next is a societal impact. Reducing food waste allows us to optimize our food and feed more people. And, finally, there is a significant environmental benefit. The number one substance going into our landfills is food waste. As it decomposes, it emits greenhouse gases that cause this pollution blanket to surround the planet. That pollution blanket traps heat and warms the planet. So, when we reduce our food waste, it's one of the top three activities we can do to reduce warming temperatures and extreme weather events. We all have the ability to combat climate change through our household food waste. These small changes in our food waste - they're going to result in positive financial, societal, and environmental benefits. It's such a powerful, impactful decision to reassess your food waste and think about ways you can reduce it.   Bios Dr. Laura Leets is an accomplished researcher, teacher, and mentor. She brings 30 years of experience from academic and industry environments.  She currently serves as an innovation lead and senior principal scientist at MITRE. In this leadership capacity, she works with researchers to identify, shape and conduct important, transformative, and impactful projects for government sponsors and the nation. She also serves as an adjunct professor at Georgetown University's Communication, Culture, and Technology Program and previously spent a decade as a Professor of Communication at Stanford University.  She has been recognized with several top paper and teaching awards throughout her academic career.    Grace Mika, B.S., is a data scientist in MITRE's Modeling & Analysis Innovation Center, where she has worked on projects for the Center of Disease Control, Internal Revenue Service, Veterans Benefits Association, and the Office of the Undersecretary of Defense, Acquisitions & Sustainment. She is passionate about visualizing data in a clear, accurate, and accessible way. Grace was instrumental in the design of a first-of-its-kind Food Waste Tracker App, which allows users to track waste as it occurs within their homes. Grace holds a B.S. in Applied Math and Psychology from the College of William & Mary and is currently working towards her Masters of Analytics at Georgia Institute of Technology.

Food prices continue to rise, and yet American households throw out roughly $150 worth of groceries per month, according to a Wall Street Journal analysis of data from BLS and ReFED, a nonprofit dedicated to reducing food waste. Wall Street Journal personal finance reporter Imani Moise joins host J.R. Whalen to discuss ways to rein in your grocery spending to avoid wasting food and your money. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

This month, USAID is hosting a Food Loss and Waste Theme Month on Agrilinks to recognize the fourth International Day of Awareness of Food Loss and Waste (FLW) and elevate the global conversation on FLW. To celebrate FLW Month, the USAID Kitchen Sink Podcast is publishing two special episodes in September. Our first episode is with Dana Gunders, Executive Director of ReFED, a unique organization with a large network collaborating across the food system to reduce FLW. Dana provides a “pulse check” on what is happening in the domestic FLW space and the role that ReFED plays. Together, we discuss what makes ReFED unique and how this model could be replicated in the countries in which USAID works. We conclude our conversation by discussing the importance of private sector investment in FLW reduction.You can subscribe to receive the latest episodes of USAID's Kitchen Sink and listen to our episodes on the platform of your choice: Apple, Spotify, and more! Video recordings of the episodes are available on YouTube. Check in every month for new episodes as global experts discuss a range of issues about FLW and methane emissions - from the critical role of youth to the staggering economic costs - and learn about specific ways that USAID is tackling FLW around the world. If you have an idea for an episode topic you'd like to see featured or if you would like to participate in an episode of USAID's Kitchen Sink, please reach out to Nika Larian (nlarian@usaid.gov).There's no time to waste!

Ashley Zanolli has been a food waste warrior for more than 17 years, working on various state and national government initiatives to support sustainable food management, water quality and climate sustainability. While at the Environmental Protection Agency, Ashley's team developed the community-based social marketing campaign “Food: Too Good To Waste” to inspire behavior change and reduce food wasted at home. Today, she advises on the development and implementation of a national strategy to reduce wasted food and increase organics recycling across the supply chain. On this episode of “Food Lab Talk,” Michiel speaks with Ashley about how her career path has transformed the way she thinks about protecting the environment and addressing climate change; her learnings on how to guide consumer behavior change; and her perspective on the role of government in combating food waste.  Ashley Zanolli: “The timeline for systemic change is rather long, relative to our lifetime. How do you set the stage as if it were a play so that the props we need to build the food system we want are eventually the only ones that are available? And you can do that through policies, through incentives, through different structures so that disparate entities and non-traditional partners start to see what's in it for them in new ways. At this point, given projected climate impacts, security of supply inflation, the stakes are too high not to work together and I think you are de-risking the system when you focus on preventing food waste.”  01:07 Intro on Ashley 05:49 Redefining the term “food waste” 07:29 Government's role in fighting food waste 08:35 Driving action and prevention through comprehensive goal setting 09:43 Amplifying systemic impact via public-private partnerships 13:00 Staying motivated to drive slow-moving change 17:23 Opportunities to fight waste in the system 18:20 Why we need to break down silos and measure differently 21:31 How might we accelerate progress on known solutions? 23:00 Consumer behavior change as the “unlock” to progress 24:10 Incentivizing boots on the ground 25:16 How to: guide systems change 27:02 Focus on the outcome, not the solution 28:20 What it takes to influence a system: translating, listening, and more 30:56 Why you shouldn't be afraid to ask dumb questions 32:29 Anyone can be an expert 33:36 Doing work “with” not “for” people 35:25 What to look for in a mentor and where to find one  Links Project Drawdown The Waste and Resources Action Programme (WRAP) Love Food Hate Waste campaign The Courtauld Commitment 2030 Pacific Coast Collaborative Learn more about ReFED in Episode 1 U.S. Food Loss and Waste Champions 2030 Food: Too Good to Waste campaign The 5 Whys of Problem Solving Upcycled Food Association BAMX: Bancos de Alimentos de Mexico  Subscribe, rate, review the show at foodlabtalk.com  *The views expressed by the guests in this podcast don't necessarily represent the host's views, nor those of his employer.  

Dana Gunders is the Executive Director of ReFED, a national nonprofit that advances data-driven solutions to help train, inspire, and strategize around food waste reduction. By taking a holistic view of the food system, and focused, purposeful action, ReFED is working to achieve a 50% food waste reduction in accordance with the United Nations' 2030 Sustainable Development Goals. On this episode of “Food Lab Talk,” Michiel speaks with Dana about why tackling food waste requires a full-supply-chain view, what Dana views as the biggest barriers and opportunities, and how solving for waste will impact our global food system.  Dana Gunders: “It is just the dumbest problem out there and one that is so solvable. I think we look at climate change and it feels so big and daunting, but wasting food is not. Wasting less food is not rocket science, right? It's something we all can do, we have control over and it feels very much within our reach and I think that helps keep me motivated.”  01:01 Intro on Dana and the food waste problem 03:34 Background on ReFED 07:55 Long-term progress on food waste reduction 09:32 How to stay motivated to fight food waste 12:08 Tools and potential solutions to stop food waste 15:55 Barriers to scaling progress 17:51 Opportunities for reducing waste across different food groups 00:21 Tracking, measurement and metrics 23:42 Motivating individuals and organizations to act 26:41 Addressing skeptics by sharing individual impact 28:14 What's on the horizon?  Links Learn more about ReFED The ReFED Catalytic Grant Fund ReFED Insights Engine Wasted: How America is Losing Up to 40 Percent of Its Food from Farm to Fork to Landfill Waste-Free Kitchen Handbook: A Guide to Eating Well and Saving Money by Wasting Less Food ReFED Roadmap to Reduce U.S. Food Waste by 20 Percent North American Leaders Make Historic Commitment to Food Waste Reduction  Subscribe, rate, review the show at foodlabtalk.com  *The views expressed by the guests in this podcast don't necessarily represent the host's views, nor those of his employer.  

Reducing your food waste can help you eat healthier, save money, and support the Earth. Listen in as national food waste expert Dana Gunders and host Mary Purdy, MS, RDN discuss mindset shifts and share actionable strategies to help you reduce how much food you throw away. In this episode we'll cover: (5:09) Why we should be concerned about food waste (8:20) Root causes of food waste (12:14) Mindset shifts & strategies to help you reduce your food waste (24:49) Thoughts on convenience foods & meal delivery kits (31:09) How larger institutions can reduce their food waste Dana Gunders is a national expert on food systems and is the Executive Director of ReFED, a nonprofit working to reduce food loss and waste. She received her bachelor's degree in earth systems and master's in sustainable business practices from Stanford University. Named “the woman who helped start the waste-free movement” by Consumer Reports, Gunders is the author of the landmark report “Wasted: How America Is Losing Up to 40 Percent of Its Food from Farm to Fork to Landfill.” She is also the author of the Waste-Free Kitchen Handbook. For show notes, transcripts, and to learn more about host Mary Purdy, MS, RDN, visit http://healthcare.orgain.com/podcast/episodes/listen/season/3/episode/24. Be sure to subscribe to this podcast so you never miss a new episode! Disclaimer: This podcast is for informational purposes only and is not intended to be medical advice. The material discussed on this podcast, and displayed on the associated webpage, is not intended to be a substitute for professional medical advice, diagnosis or treatment. Always seek the advice of your physician or other qualified healthcare provider with any questions you may have regarding a medical condition or treatment and before undertaking a new health regimen.

With at least one third of food in the US going to waste every day (despite 34 million people nationwide living with food insecurity) and acting as the third largest source of greenhouse gas emissions in landfills, we need urgent solutions when it comes to food waste. In today's episode, Victoria talks with two people whose work uses digital solutions to tackle this issue: Giulia Stellari, director for ESG and impact at Fall Line Capital, and Jackie Suggitt, director of capital, innovation and engagement at ReFED. Zero100 head of research, Colin Gilbert, joins Victoria to help synthesize what these insights mean for the future of zero percent carbon, 100% digital supply chains. Show notes: Giulia Stellari Fall Line Capital Jackie Suggitt ReFED Wasting food just feeds climate change, new UN environment report warns UNEP Food Waste Index Report 2021 Feeding the World Sustainably Food Waste and its Links to Greenhouse Gases and Climate Change From Farm to Kitchen: The Environmental Impacts of U.S. Food Waste Regenerative Agriculture 101 California's Water Emergency: Satisfying The Thirst Of Almonds While The Wells Of The People That Harvest Them Run Dry Cutting edge technologies to end food waste Bowery Farming Mimica Lab Olleco The Pacific Coast Food Waste Commitment Using Artificial Intelligence to Reduce Food Waste in Grocery Retail

#298: Almost one-third of all food purchases in the United States go to waste. I know you are spending precious time and money prepping all these BLW foods for your baby and our guest Dana Gunders is intent on making sure you don't waste food. Dana is a mom of 2 BLW grads, the Executive Director of ReFed and author of the Waste Free Kitchen Handbook. In this interview she's sharing real actions you can take right now to lower waste in your kitchen. From how to freeze foods for your baby to the right way to store herbs and how to know which expired food is safe to eat, Dana is on a mission to help us lower waste in our home kitchens.

#298: Almost one-third of all food purchases in the United States go to waste. I know you are spending precious time and money prepping all these BLW foods for your baby and our guest Dana Gunders is intent on making sure you don't waste food. Dana is a mom of 2 BLW grads, the Executive Director of ReFed and author of the Waste Free Kitchen Handbook. In this interview she's sharing real actions you can take right now to lower waste in your kitchen. From how to freeze foods for your baby to the right way to store herbs and how to know which expired food is safe to eat, Dana is on a mission to help us lower waste in our home kitchens.

It's tempting to discard a carton of milk or a loaf of bread once it's passed its “best by” date. But that “expiration” date only means that food is no longer at its freshest – it's still perfectly safe to eat. Every year, Americans toss millions of pounds of edible food into landfills, contributing to climate change and exacerbating food insecurity issues. We'll talk with food waste experts about how to interpret expiration dates and make the most of the surplus in our food system. Guests: Dana Gunders, executive director, ReFED; author, "Waste Free Kitchen Handbook" Yasmin Tayag, staff writer, The Atlantic Diana Lara, executive director, Food Finders

ReFED, a food waste nonprofit, is pushing for regulations to standardize the dates that appear on food packaging. Learn more at https://www.yaleclimateconnections.org/ 

It's estimated that 54 million tons of food or almost a quarter of all food in the U.S. is wasted. That translates to 90 billion meals. Food waste is not just an issue of food that could go to those who are food insecure or hungry, but it is an environmental issue as well. How are we wasting so much food and what can be done to stop it? With us today on Smart Talk is Jackie Suggitt, Director of Capital, Innovation & Engagement, with ReFED, which describes itself as a national nonprofit dedicated to ending food loss and waste across the U.S. food system.Support WITF: https://www.witf.org/support/give-now/See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Today's episode focused on food waste, a topic that I love talking about as it's one of the most accessible ways for pretty much anyone to make a difference on climate change.  Wasting food is a huge problem. Roughly 40% of the world's food is wasted each year, while almost a billion people are undernourished. Further, wasted food adds up to 8-10% of all human-caused greenhouse gas emissions. Like many people working on this issue, my understanding of the food waste opportunity was shaped by an organization called ReFED. They launched in 2015 and have been one of the best examples of an effort to accelerate investment and entrepreneurship through data, storytelling and partnerships.  We're fortunate to be joined by Dana Gunders, Executive Director of ReFED. Prior to joining ReFED, Dana wrote the book, The Waste-Free Kitchen Handbook: A Guide to Eating Well and Saving Money By Wasting Less Food. We were also joined by Gaeleen Quin, Head of Impact for the fast growing food waste startup Too Good to Go, which enables retailers to offer soon to be wasted food to consumers at a discount.  We discuss a wide range of opportunities for eliminating food waste, and tap into Gaeleen and Dana's insights to growing this emerging innovation space. No matter who you are, if you buy and eat food, I'm sure you'll find something immediately useful in this episode. In today's episode, we cover:[4:44] Why does food waste matter & why it matters to climate change [8:18] What is ReFED & what is their role [9:51] Food waste categories & which ones offer the most leverage  [11:55] Where we need to focus most & where there's most opportunity for impact [13:44] The problem that Too Good to Go aiming to solve [16:22] The hardest part of gaining market adoption [19:47] What can retailers do about food waste [21:43] The importance of Gaeleen's role as Head of Impact [23:27] Examples of partnerships with schools and community organizations [25:21] The most effective way for us to reduce or eliminate food waste [31:30] The status on ReFED's goal to cut food waste in half by 2030 [37:10] Making immense amounts of data inspiring & actionable [43:19] The most exciting things that Gaeleen & Dana are working on right now Resources Mentionedhttps://refed.org/ (ReFED) https://toogoodtogo.com/ (Too Good to Go) Connect with Dana Gunders and Gaeleen QuinnConnect with Dana on https://www.linkedin.com/in/dana-gunders/ (LinkedIn) Connect with Gaeleen on https://www.linkedin.com/in/gaeleen-quinn-126b5110/ (LinkedIn) Connect With Jason Rissmanhttps://investedinclimate.com (https://InvestedInClimate.com)  On https://www.linkedin.com/in/jasonrissman/ (LinkedIn) On https://twitter.com/jasonrissman (Twitter) Subscribe to https://pod.link/1620915138 (Invested In Climate)

Andrew Shakman had a tough job. After two full days of inspiring talks at ReFED's annual food waste symposium, the CEO of Leanpath was asked to give a closing message that would inspire and catalyze action. He delivered, so we asked Andrew to come on the podcast to discuss how he thinks those delivering food waste reduction solutions can do more to help make a bigger impact. As always, you can find more Spoon podcasts at www.thespoon.tech via Knit

“Nobody wakes up wanting to waste food, it's just a matter of having the right information at the right time.”   Dana Gunders (19:34-19:41)   When it comes to food waste around the world, the statistics are staggering. We all know it's a problem and almost every country is fighting it. What can we do to effectively decrease our food waste (and the carbon emissions that come with it), decrease food insecurity, and create the food system we desire? ReFED is the leader in data-driven solutions to fight food waste, working across the food system to cut food loss and waste in half by 2030.   Dana Gunders, Executive Director of ReFED says they can only accomplish this with massive participation. It's estimated that over 400 billion dollars worth of food (about 2% of the GDP) is wasted, and if the food waste in America was eradicated alone, it would feed our country's food insecure population three times over! That's why ReFED is working in multiple ways to educate and inform, and assist the individuals and companies who want to put their dollars towards efforts that are going to implement the most change in the quickest manner.   “When folks allocative financial resources for a macro issue like food waste, they need the guidance of an institution like ReFED to make sure that investment is going towards a noble cause.” Lori Taylor (10:16-10:30)    The first pillar of work ReFED is focused on is collecting accurate data. No one's collecting data when they're throwing the garbage out, so a lot of estimating is still required. ReFED wants to paint an accurate picture of what's going on so people know where to focus their efforts. One way they do this is through a data platform on their website that's analyzed 42 solutions and their efficiency rate. Their second pillar of work is in the investment space, where they also have a capital tracker that monitors investment on their website. There's been quite a recent explosion of innovative startups and investment directed towards food waste and ReFED wants to catalyze investment through public, philanthropic, and private dollars.   Did you know about 35% of food grown in the United States ends up in the trash? 37% of that food waste is created at the household level, with the number one product of that waste being produce, and the number two being leftovers.   Even though ReFED doesn't work to reach consumers directly, their role in connecting companies, small businesses, stakeholders, researchers, and local governments with one another has a greater impact. For example, there's over 200 companies globally who have made some sort of commitment to helping eradicate food waste, but they need ReFED's help in understanding how to reach that goal. They're also working to encourage federal agencies to create a consumer awareness campaign to spread this information further. Grocery retailers, like Kroger and their Zero Hunger Zero Waste commitment (which has already seen a 19 reduction in waste), have been doing a great job at driving forward sustainability initiatives, like educating consumers on how to use produce once it's wilted or bruised.   “There's a great opportunity to help people use their products better and that helps them use their food budget better.” Dana Gunders (16:25-16:37)   Considering the average family of four is spending $2,000 on food they aren't actually eating, implementing changes that help reduce waste should be high on everyone's list! Outside of ReFED, Dana has written her own book called The Waste Free Kitchen Handbook, which you can learn more about on Episode 79, that offers strategies, references, recipes and a directory of produce which shows you how to use food items up in a clever way when you might've just thrown them out. For example, Dana's book has a delicious berry avocado chocolate mousse recipe that uses overripe berries and avocados that are brown!    There's plenty of action for us to take across the entire food supply chain, and starting with Dana's book or learning more on ReFED's website is how you can make a major difference in your kitchen at home. Visit ReFED's website at www.refed.org and listen to Episode 79 to learn more about the actionable strategies you can start implementing today with Dana's book.%   How to get involved Join The Produce Moms Group on Facebook and continue the discussion every week!  Reach out to us - we'd love to hear more about where you are in life and business! Find out more here.    If you liked this episode, be sure to subscribe and leave a quick review on iTunes. It would mean the world to hear your feedback and we'd love for you to help us spread the word!

In 2018, the EPA estimated that more food made its way to landfills and incinerators than any other type of trash. This hour, we're talking with people who help us understand food waste and its impacts. How much food are we wasting and how might we turn food waste into opportunities to reduce food insecurity and generate energy? We talk with Katy Hart, an expert from ReFED, a national non-profit dedicated to ending food loss and waste across the U.S. food system. We also talk with CT Public's Patrick Skahill about his reporting on where our trash goes and how Connecticut and neighboring states are viewing food waste as a resource to reclaim. Plus, Matt Joswiack is a New York chef who turns restaurant food waste into meals that nourish his community. For more information about food waste in Connecticut and New England, read or listen to Patrick's story “Out of the trash, saving cash: How food waste could transform New England's garbage,” and watch the video featuring Domingo Medina's subscription composting company, Peels & Wheels in New Haven. GUESTS: Katy Hart: Operations Director of ReFED. Patrick Skahill: Senior reporter at Connecticut Public. Matt Jozwiack: Founder and CEO of Rethink Food, based in New York. This show was produced by Robyn Doyon-Aitken, Catie Talarski, Emily Charash, and Katrice Claudio. Our interns are Sara Gasparotto and Michayla Savitt. Seasoned is available as a podcast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Google Podcasts, Stitcher, or wherever you get your podcasts. Subscribe and never miss an episode! Support the show: https://www.wnpr.org/donate See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Companies are fighting to end food waste in more ways than one, from packaging technology to supply chain innovations.  In this episode, I'm joined by Dana Gunders, Executive Director of ReFED, who discusses the scope of the food waste problem and effective solutions, and Aidan Mouat, CEO and C o-Founder of Hazel Technologies, Inc., who talks about the role of innovation and new technologies in reducing food waste throughout the supply chain.  Join us as we discuss: New and emerging technology in the war against food waste How to effectively implement supply chain and infrastructure innovations 3 ways the produce industry could reduce food loss  More information about guests Dana Gunders and Aidan Mouat: Dana Gunders' LinkedIn Profile: https://www.linkedin.com/in/dana-gunders/  ReFED Company Website: https://refed.org/  Aidan Mouat's LinkedIn Profile: https://www.linkedin.com/in/aidan-mouat-53ba661a/  Hazel Technologies, Inc. Company Website: https://www.hazeltechnologies.com/ 

Companies are fighting to end food waste in more ways than one, from packaging technology to supply chain innovations.  In this episode, I'm joined by Dana Gunders, Executive Director of ReFED, who discusses the scope of the food waste problem and effective solutions, and Aidan Mouat, CEO and C o-Founder of Hazel Technologies, Inc., who talks about the role of innovation and new technologies in reducing food waste throughout the supply chain.  Join us as we discuss: New and emerging technology in the war against food waste How to effectively implement supply chain and infrastructure innovations 3 ways the produce industry could reduce food loss   More information about guests Dana Gunders and Aidan Mouat: Dana Gunders' LinkedIn Profile: https://www.linkedin.com/in/dana-gunders/  ReFED Company Website: https://refed.org/  Aidan Mouat's LinkedIn Profile: https://www.linkedin.com/in/aidan-mouat-53ba661a/  Hazel Technologies, Inc. Company Website: https://www.hazeltechnologies.com/ 

The US wastes roughly 40% of the food it produces, much of it perfectly edible and nutritious. Food is lost or wasted for a variety of reasons, from the farm, to the store, to the restaurant, to our very own home kitchens, where each household is throwing away around 21% of the food it buys. In this episode we explain why food waste is a problem, touch on how some grocery stores, restaurants and food companies are working to fix the problem, and dig into some of the cultural reasons why our society treats food as disposable. Finally, we hit on how you can make changes in how you shop, cook and eat that will make a meaningful difference environmentally and economically.Follow @foodprintorg on Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter . Stay Informed. Get the latest food news, from FoodPrint.

This Episode of the Food Institute Podcast is Sponsored by: Mazars How is Blue Apron addressing packaging and food waste in the meal kit vertical? Hannah Koski, head of sustainability and social impact at Blue Apron, joins The Food Institute Podcast to discuss different programs the company is leveraging, its ESG principles, and how the New York-based meal kit maker balances the fine line between providing convenient food offerings and reducing waste. Hosted By: Chris Campbell More About Hannah Koski: Hannah Koski is Head of Sustainability and Social Impact at Blue Apron, where she strives to evaluate and account for the environmental and social impacts of the company's sourcing and business practices. She has dedicated her 10+ years in the food industry to developing sustainable supply chains. Her experience spans the value chain, from producer on a diversified organic farm to Director of Procurement. She holds a master's degree in horticulture from Cornell University with a focus on urban agriculture and extension programs, and directed the nationally-recognized football-field-turned-farm at Paul Quinn College in Dallas, Texas, which aims to address food insecurity via student-led social entrepreneurship. In Dallas, she has also provided consulting and educational services to promote urban farming and community gardening in North Texas. She serves on The Common Market Texas Board of Directors and as a member of ReFED's Expert Network, working to significantly reduce US food waste. More About Blue Apron: Our food system—the way in which food is grown and distributed—is complicated, and making good choices for your family can be difficult. We are changing that: By partnering with farmers to raise the highest-quality ingredients, by creating a distribution system that delivers ingredients at a better value and by investing in the things that matter most—our environment and our communities. This will be a decades-long effort, but with each Blue Apron home chef, together we can build a better food system. To learn more about Blue Apron, please visit: Homepage: https://www.blueapron.com/ Blog: https://blog.blueapron.com/ Blog Post on Sustainable Packaging Goals: https://blog.blueapron.com/sustainable-packaging-goals/ For More in the Mazars ESG Podcast Series, Please Listen To: How Fair Trade USA Connects Consumers and Producers Thanks to Our Sponsor: Mazars Mazars in the US provides food and beverage companies with the specialized expertise required to venture further in this dynamic industry environment. The more than 200 leading food and beverage manufacturers, distributors, restaurants, and importers who call us their trusted advisors are a testament to our deep market knowledge and global capabilities. In recent years, sustainability has evolved substantially in the food and beverage marketplace. Good corporate governance and social responsibility are not simply rooted in doing the right thing, they also bring with them performance benefits. We help companies address their sustainability strategies from design and embedding to reporting and assurance. We give you a competitive edge to maximize results. For more information, please visit https://www.mazars.us/Home/Services/Sustainability.

Dana Gunders is my guest on Episode 96 of Inside Ideas with Marc Buckley. Dana is a national expert on food systems and was one of the first people to raise the alarm about how much food is wasted across the country and the subsequent impacts on the environment, food security, and the economy. Dana has served as ReFED's Executive Director since March 2020, and she has a long history with the organization having served as a founding board member when ReFED was established in 2016. For almost a decade prior to her work with ReFED, Dana was a Senior Scientist at the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC), where she authored the landmark Wasted report about food waste and testified before Congress. While at NRDC, Dana launched the "Save The Food" campaign with the Ad Council to provide consumers with easy-to-use strategies to reduce food waste in their own kitchens. She then started Next Course LLC to strategically advise organizations, including Google, and authored the popular Waste-Free Kitchen Handbook. Dana has made a number of appearances in the media, including "PBS NewsHour," "Last Week Tonight" with John Oliver, and FOX Business, and she was called “the woman who helped start the waste-free movement” by Consumer Reports. https://refed.com/

On this special Earth Day episode, we welcome guest host Turner Wyatt, CEO of the Upcycled Food Association. Turner and I have a fun and enlightening conversation with Dana Gunders, Executive Director of ReFED and author of the Waste Free Kitchen Handbook. We reflect on what Earth Day means to each of us and how we all can have an impact in the goal of reducing food waste and protecting Mother Earth every day through the choices we make. On this episode we also celebrate a big announcement from UFA and learn about the exciting and engaging interactive tool from ReFED called the Insights Engine. Upcycled Food Association Unveils Upcycled Certified Mark World's first mark certifying upcycled food in products gives consumers crucial tool to address urgent climate and environmental crises through purchasing power. Check out the new Upcycled Certified Mark and learn more about what it means and where you will be able to find it soon! ReFED is a national nonprofit dedicated to ending food loss and waste across the U.S. food system by advancing data-driven solutions. Insights Engine: Developed by ReFED the Insights Engine is a data and solutions hub for food loss and waste, designed to provide anyone interested in food waste reduction with the information and insights they need to take meaningful action to address the problem. Visit www.toogoodtowastepodcast.com for all episodes and to learn more about the Too good To waste podcast series. Follow us on Instagram @toogoodtowaste_podcast Thanks to our sponsors: NETZRO, SBC - www.netzro.us Upcycled Food Association - www.upcycledfood.org Produced by Hi-Fly'n Productions www.hiflyn.com Producer | Host: Kevin May Associate Producer | Amy Gilbert Creative Development | Sue Marshall What's UP Co-Host | Rochelle Still --- Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/toogoodtowaste/message

Hear from Alexandria Coari, Capital & Innovation Director, ReFED; Josh Mann, Public Sector Solutions Manager, Waste Management; and Turner Wyatt, Co-Founder & CEO, Upcycled Food Association as they share their perspective on where the waste industry is headed. These 40 Under 40 Award winners will discuss the biggest challenges and opportunities facing the waste industry, how the upcoming workforce differs from previous generations, how they see the industry changing, and more. #NothingWastedPodcast

For the rest of this week Food Tank alongside the ReFresh working group will be airing daily podcasts with panelists discussing “The Intersection of Food + Tech.” Over the next five days we are featuring 20 speakers co-hosted by Danielle Nierenberg and Forbes Magazine’s Chloe Sorvino. You can also watch these conversations live at 2PM all week. Additionally, Food Tank and ReFresh just released a new policy platform on the intersection of food and technology. Please visit FoodTank.com to download your free copy.   Today’s theme is Empowering Consumers Through Transparency. We are so excited to have these amazing panelists: Mark Kaplan of (en)visible; Matt Wadiak of Cooks Venture; Rick Whitted of Feeding Children Everywhere, and Dana Gunders of ReFed.

Reducing food waste isn't just about keeping food out of landfill - it's an essential part of creating a sustainable, resilient and inclusive food system, one that maximizes water and land resources, minimizes climate impacts, and makes the best use of the food we grow. Learn how using local sourcing, whole-product utilization, and lots of effort helped Jackie Suggitt and ReFed do it. www.refed.com https://twitter.com/refed https://www.linkedin.com/in/jackie-suggitt/

Today on Point 01, Dana Gunders, Executive Director of ReFED, joins Aaron to discuss the complexity of food waste. Dana published the revolutionary report “Wasted: How America is Losing Up to 40% of Its Food from Farm to Fork to Landfill” and from there began her journey as the "the woman who helped start the waste-free movement." Dana founded and led the NRDC’s work on food waste, authored Waste-Free Kitchen Handbook, and testified in Congress just to name a few projects. Her work on food waste has been featured on John Oliver, CNN, NPR, NBC, The New York Times, Wall Street Journal, and hundreds of other news outlets. Dana is THE expert on food waste and we are thrilled to talk with her about this multi-faceted problem with no one-size-fits-all solution. If you want to stay up-to-date with Dana and her work, please follow her on Twitter @dgunders. The Point 01 podcast is produced by Therma, a smart refrigeration monitoring company. To follow along with Therma’s clean cooling initiatives and Point 01 content, find us on Twitter, LinkedIn, and Facebook @Point01Podcast.

In 2019 the United Nations General Assembly designated September 29 as the International Day of Awareness of Food Loss and Waste. On "Food Talk with Dani Nierenberg," Dani discusses the challenges to reducing food waste and the organizations that are working to redirect food from landfills to people in need. Hear from Regina Anderson of the Food Recovery Network, Alex Coari and Dana Gunders of ReFED, and Doug O'Brien of the Global FoodBanking Network.  While you’re listening, subscribe, rate, and review the show; it would mean the world to us to have your feedback. You can listen to “Food Talk with Dani Nierenberg” wherever you consume your podcasts.

Listen to Alex Coari, Director of Capital & Innovation, ReFED (and also one of Waste360’s 40 Under 40 winners for 2020!), share her smart insights on the power of catalytic capital, how to collaborate effectively, systemically solving the food-waste problem and more. #NothingWastedPodcast

Food is the #1 product going to landfill in the US. It is simple to sell people on the problem, but what to do about this complex problem stymies action. Dana Gunders, Executive Director of ReFed, has been focused on this issue for a decade and sheds light on the many ways to take on the challenge. Dana is issuing a call to action, and each one of us is a part of the solution.Dana weaves together the seed of her personal passion for food waste, ReFed’s cutting edge economic analysis of solutions, and parallels between energy efficiency and food waste. Expect a dialogue on data, motivating capital, public policy, and consumer- behavior. And learn about food waste pre-Covid, and how the pandemic has accelerated food recovery trends and online marketplaces.Join us to learn which parts of the food waste problem are ripe for innovation, and how food waste management is a key sign of a well-run business. Dana is helping us take the critical issue of food waste and break it down into specific solutions. Whether you are an entrepreneur, policy maker, investor, corporate executive -- there is an opportunity here for you. And for all of us as eaters, we’re on the hook too.

Learn more about RegrainedSupport the show and get on monthly mentorship calls with Fabian. Join here.Full Transcript:F Geyrhalter:Welcome to the show, Dan.D Kurzrock:Hey, thanks so much for having me here.F Geyrhalter:Yeah, absolutely. We talked about this a little bit before we hit record, but today's June 1st. We're still in a pandemic but as of this past weekend, the majority of cities in the US is taken over by rightful necessary protests, but also by looters and riots. And we see our cities on fire. I had a very late night monitoring downtown Long Beach, which is where my office is located which has been an epicenter of violence and looting last night. Jessie, our creative lead, is already out there helping the community in the clean up. You Dan are based in San Francisco and the company is in Berkeley and that is another hotspot up in San Francisco in Oakland. And I was even debating if given the circumstances, we should postpone our interview, but we both decided early this morning to power through despite the lack of sleep and the craziness unfolding in front of our eyes. How was your night North? Are the ReGrained plant and offices, is everything still intact?D Kurzrock:Yeah. I mean, like a lot of folks, time are troubling in general. Physically been in pretty insulated from this whole thing with shelter in place. And actually my grandma basically lives with us right now, so I've been really careful about going out, but it's very troubling. I don't have a lot of words for it, but still situation wasn't... This is kind of the culmination of a lot of complicated factors leading up to it, so I hope we are taking an opportunity to wake up. And I hope we can emerge from this in a better place than it feels like we are right now, but still glad to be here with you.It's good to have distractions and good to keep moving the positive things forward that we can in the world. I always try to focus on what I can control and even within this business that we're building, but it doesn't always feel like we can control everything within that even. So really looking forward to taking some time and chatting with you about brand and about purpose and take an action.F Geyrhalter:Absolutely and that's why I'm so glad to have you on today too because you crafted a brand that actually creates positive change in this world. And there's always time to talk about that. It's my personal passion and that's why I'm doing what I'm doing because I for one believe that business as a whole will change fundamentally over the next decades for the better. And you guys are part of that change in your own small ways as you said and they can become rather big in a snowball effect. So you guys used to brew your own beer, which is a strange beginning to someone who's changing the world. So you used to brew your own beer, even under age I heard, but we're not going to talk about that.D Kurzrock:Yeah. A lot of good ideas... A lot of good ideas start over a beer.In our case... Just for everyone listening, my name is Dan Kurzrock, I'm the co-founder, CEO of a food recycling company called ReGrained. What we do is we tackle food waste, so we identify overlooked, undervalued ingredients that are kind of hiding in plain sight. The food system closed the loop on those. So what we do is primarily right now, we take the grain from the beer brewing process. To make beer you use a lot of malt, just basically like sprouted barley and you take the sugars from that. You extract them as a liquid, that's what ferments and becomes beer. Can spoil [inaudible 00:05:06]. And there's another part of the process there.But as it relates to the barley itself, once the sugars have been extracted from it, there's still the physical grain. It's soaking wet, but it's got a lot of fiber, it's got a lot of protein, it's got prebiotics. There's a lot of really good stuff in there that currently goes to lower use. And so what we've done is built the business around applying this new processing technology. We actually have a patent on it and we can create a flour or a powder and be able to think about it that can be incorporated into new food product development. And so what we're doing is the solution that helps the food system do more with less.It reduces waste on one end and feeds people on the other end. And through R&D, we actually discovered that our process doesn't just work for the billions of pounds of grain from the beer industry, but can also be used to apply for other streams. Like think pressings from juice or the leftovers from milking of almonds or oats and there's a lot of opportunity that is being left off the table. And so we've built this business to be a platform to close that loop. And we have a consumer brand, which I imagine we'll spend some time speaking about here. And then there's also a B2B side of what we do, where we actually partner with other brands. We sell them the ingredients and we help educate and activate the world, the market to reduce waste, which is one of the most pressing solutions to climate change out there.F Geyrhalter:Absolutely and let's talk about the actual consumer brand for a second. So ReGrained you started coming up with this process and you applied it I assume to a lot of different foods to see... No pun intended, but what sticks? Where it actually works the best and you came up with these bars in the beginning. And how did this evolve? How did that start? How did it turn from two guys in a kitchen exploring how to utilize what you just realized, to actually being carried in stores?D Kurzrock:Yeah. It's how do you go from idea to product? So for us, actually the first thing that we ever made was bread. And so I was making beer every week as a college student and I'd have actually about a pound of grain for every six packs. So if you can visualize it, we were brewing five gallons of beer at a time, it's a third of a keg. We'd do 20 to 30 pounds of grain every time we made a batch of beer and then I would turn around and take that grain and use it to make loaves of bread and then sell those loaves of bread in order to buy more ingredients to brew more beer. That was really the origin of this that they got us asking the bigger questions.Then realized there's this huge opportunity here not just with our own brewing operation, but with all the other breweries that are out there. This is 2010, 2011 right when the craft beer boom was starting to happen. I think it was last year, more than two new breweries on average opened per day in the US and a lot of them were opening in cities. And so we thought what if we came up with a way to basically take the supply at scale and do something more with it. And the problem was when we knew we wanted to do ingredients, but we figured we couldn't get other companies probably to buy our ingredients before we proved that people would buy products that were made with them.And so the bread was great, but it takes a long time to make. And the shelf life is very short. And again remember we were 20 years old at the time working in a home kitchen and we had a lot of bars. And we figured we can make these by hand. We can cut them into pretty even rectangles, we can package them. The first packaging was literally Ziploc bags. I was like a [inaudible 00:09:09] dealer. The second packaging was hand sealed compostable packaging and it was just a way to commercialize the idea.I don't think of it as a Trojan horse for what we were actually trying to work towards. And it's funny because if I could go back, just want to clear on that. And I'll tell you about, I'd love to say about our other products that we just launched because it was the absolute opposite way of developing products that the bar was. We brought these to the market because we could do it pretty quickly and we could generate revenue in the short term. And it was something that enabled us to actually take action on our idea and the bars are great, but the bar category as we later learned is highly competitive and we didn't know.We've had some success in getting it to stores. We're in about 2000 stores now, but we've also now launched a new product which is this puff chip. It's a salty snack and that product, what we did is actually took a huge step back and applied everything that we knew about our ingredient, how it could be used and really tried to I guess bridge that gap between what can we do and what should we do. And developed a product for a need in the market, whereas the first line, these bars was really just the first commercialization of a concept if that makes sense.F Geyrhalter:It was a proof of concept. Totally. This is interesting, but it sounded to me like the bigger vision has always been to turn ReGrained into a platform to use your ReGrained super grain as an ingredient that can be used in all kinds of other products from all kinds of other brands. But now you're still pivoting your consumer brands as well. So you're doing both parallel right now.D Kurzrock:Yeah. So the consumer brand... That's correct about the big vision and part of that is if we were to do even like 100 million sales with our consumer brand, we'd still only work with a handful of breweries. There's just so much supply that's out there. So to make the impact that we want to make and to address the market opportunity in the most meaningful way possible, we have a very clear strategic vision for how this thing scales. And a lot of really active partnerships in development with leading in some cases, multinational food companies that are in development with us on different things.But the consumer brand is something that allows us to not only generate cash in the short term. Sales cycles for ingredients are very long, but also the test messaging, which gets to your point about the branding. So we continue to evolve our consumer brand because it helps us in real time better understand how the market responds to this new idea about recycling. Early on for example, we put the tagline, eat beer on everything.F Geyrhalter:Yeah. I think I remember that because I did some research on some of the past interviews with you and that was still a thing. And I think even naming wise, not only the tagline, but naming wise, I think you used beer type names for each one of the bars. Which was most probably confusing because it didn't taste like beer.D Kurzrock:Yeah. It actually ended up confusing, but we learned. It did a really good job though by getting attention. It created this cognitive dissonance that kind of made people go, "What? Eat beer?" And we then could earn the opportunity to explain what we're actually doing. We later learned through testing that while it was catchy and made for a great t-shirt, it confused people and we've obviously had a lot of opportunities like that to use our brand as a way to test different approaches that we can then pass on as learning to our platform partners.F Geyrhalter:So let's talk about this a little bit more because when we met, I thinks it's been... I believe it's been over a year ago, we tried our best to keep scheduling this and then we finally made it, but your brand was still in that specific weird zone where it was a little bit rough around the edges where you try to get attention to basically do an elevator pitch rather than do the big consumer push. When did you start actively investing in branding and would you do it earlier or later with your next start up?D Kurzrock:Well, we have always invested a lot of time at least in branding, although we were young and relatively inexperienced at first. I mean the first labels we made ourselves using PowerPoint or Publisher or something like that. And then we did engage a kind of a pretty common actually because of how young we were and we started. We had talented friends and so the first few versions of the product that I worked with a graphic designer friend who did it just for the portfolio and out of generosity. And then when we made the jump from eat beer to this super grand plus somewhat of a nutritional, the pluses by the way I know it's a mouthful, but it enables us on the nutrition facts panel to use the plus like you use an asterisk for organic, for up cycled.So we can say, "Hey, these ingredients are upcycled actually on the ingredient panel." So there's a layer of branding thought that went into that, but it was very iterative I guess and that each change for several years was incremental really. And what you're referring to now is if you go compared to when we met to what we look like now, I mean the whole brand got that was a revolution, not an evolution and that was definitely more of an investment in both time and financial capital to do. And we still I mean, we do everything super lean.I think really depending on the goals of the company, like what my next company is to your point, if there is a next company a lot depends on what the model and the goals are, but I do really believe that branding is something that's really important because it's the way that you are able to earn the opportunity to tell everybody about what you're doing. And so with our rebrand this revolution that we're discussing, we incorporated all of our learnings leading up to that.One of the big thematic ones is that while sustainability is arguably our biggest value proposition for what we're doing. It's one of the most important things to us at least from a values perspective. We don't believe that sustainability is necessarily a reason for purchase as much as a reason for loyalty. And so what we did is we nodded to it with our logo, it has an arrow which is for ReGrained inside and also for upcycling. The new tagline is eat up, which has a few layers and meaning including eat upcycled, but is a very vibrant, fun packaging that is really flavor forward and lifestyle forward. And we also developed a logo for upcycling.It is on the front of the pack and it's in the center of the package, but it's at the bottom. And so what we did here is try to create a brand that would be compelling on its own if there wasn't anything else there to talk about from a sustainability perspective. And then to use that as hook for the things that we really believe will make people loyal in a long term around upcycling and things like that. So we've put a lot of... We put a lot of thought into it and it's super fun. For those of you who are listening, please check us out, regrained.com would be a good place to see the branding. It's very different than what else is out there and we're proud of it and hope that it does harness enough that opportunity to have those meaningful conversations with consumers about impact and about the choices that we all make every day and what those can can net for society and the planet.F Geyrhalter:And it's really nice to have seen that change over the last year. I wonder as a consumer who might've been loyal to ReGrained the bars, and now they see this huge shift in what the company, how the company looks, how the brand voice has evolved, how the product is suddenly a very different product. Are you keeping tabs on your consumers that you had for a couple of years and are they evolving with you? What is your feedback? I'm always curious about that when a brand pivots so much like yours has.D Kurzrock:Yeah. I mean, we were still early enough in our journey that our loyal group of consumers they've definitely stayed with us. And if anything we've widened the tent and made what we're doing more appealing to more people. I also think it's worth talking about that. One of the reasons why we did such a... I always wanted to do this radical rebrand. Not always, but it had been something that I realized that every time we're doing packaging stuff, we were just kind of making incremental changes and it's scary to make a huge overhaul like we did. And in our case, it was triggered or catalyzed depending on how you look at it, by a need to reintroduce the product because we actually had a failure.We were commercializing a compostable package. So plastic packaging, let's say we can have a whole podcast episode about this. That's a huge issue, single use, it's petroleum based, landfill bounds, non-recyclable because of its multiple layers of multiple materials that can't be separated and if they could be, most of them aren't recyclable anyways. And so we were trying to do something from the beginning we were using planet friendly plastic packaging, which for flexible films, compostable is the best way to go. But our product was actually going stale in the distribution trucks before it even got to the store. And so we basically had to do its called a voluntary product fall. We don't use the R word recall because it wasn't a recall, but it was a huge challenge.And we believe that we needed to reintroduce the product as well because there were people that they didn't have an unsafe experience, but they had a bad experience essentially because obviously we were just trying to do the right thing. We made a values based choice to try and do that, but we also realized,... We ultimately realized we were trying to do too much at the same time. We kind of had to slow down the speed up. Again, it's not going to be its own podcast, but that's another. It's relevant to the branding discussion because there was this. It definitely helps us feel more comfortable making such a big jump because we also wanted to reintroduce the product.F Geyrhalter:Absolutely. And it's a huge part of a lot of rebrands and I actually prefer if a client comes to me for a rebrand when they have a huge change. May that be a huge change in direction of the company, a huge change in the product. It pivots and may there have been something negative happening and they want to change that rather than saying we want a new logo because we look stale. I'd rather have the product go stale and you pivot than only the visual change because I mean it needs to have, there needs to be a bigger message behind a rebrand so that the consumer feels like there is something changing and I can feel it, I can read it, I can sense it rather than just I'm confused why is it suddenly looking so different.I'm sure that your brand story and what you're doing as a company is affecting your company culture and if I may call it HR because I know there are people actually working. I mean this is not happening out of nowhere when you're actually producing a product. Does it make it easy to hire people if they understand how you would use waste? Is that a big magnet for you? Especially in San Francisco right where hiring is difficult even though you're not necessarily a tech company. So you're hiring very different kind of people, but does that become a big magnet for the company?D Kurzrock:Yeah. It always has been both for talent and also for press if I'm being honest. The fact that what we're doing is different in so many ways and it's got this cool hook that everyone can feel good about. And I think the most important thing of it is that our mission is very understandable and approachable. No one is in favor of food waste and also even just look at our beer angle. Beer is one of the world's oldest beverages, it's one of the most popular in the world. It's consumed in massive quantities everywhere and a lot of people don't think about the fact that beer is an agricultural product, but it uses a lot of grain to produce it. And it's something that's really, I guess quick and easy to educate someone.Like you know beer, do you know beer only has four ingredients? Do you know that the biggest ingredient used by volume is the grain and that only the sugars from that grain end up in the beer? Well, we take everything that's left and we put it the best use. We create really innovative ingredients and products and we're trying to do this thing that is really easy to get behind I think and that's part of what energizes me too. It's like I know that what we're working on is real. I know that it's good. Fundamentally it's just simple idea but it is pretty universally attractive I think. And I just of course hope that we can pull it off and bringing in the right people is the way to do that because that's...F Geyrhalter:Absolutely.D Kurzrock:Personal note.F Geyrhalter:And I guess the next question would be why are you located in San Francisco?D Kurzrock:I'm from here.F Geyrhalter:That's how easy it is?D Kurzrock:Yeah. It happens to be a great place for startups and innovation, but not so much for food [crosstalk 00:25:13]. Help you with very low margin business. It's a very expensive place to live. Now, it's not like I moved here to start this. This is my hometown. This is my community.F Geyrhalter:Makes a lot of sense.D Kurzrock:[crosstalk 00:25:25] my co-founder and that's why we're here.F Geyrhalter:And I'm super interested seeing how after this pandemic there has been this talk about Silicon Valley and San Francisco now that everyone can work from home, how does this going to change the city? Because people start to actually leave because they have amazingly paid salaries and they might just buy a ranch in Montana and happily worked for Google. So I'm super interested to see how that's going to change San Francisco and the whole landscape. It's totally off topic but it's very interesting.D Kurzrock:Maybe it'll make it... Maybe it'll make it affordable to possibly buy a home here someday. We'll see.F Geyrhalter:How about that. You stay behind and you should be the role model for that. You know what you just said before, we talked a little bit about your mission, which is deeply ingrained in your company and you don't have to write out your mission, you don't have to write out your vision, you don't need to say, "Here are our core values." Because everything is so deeply-D Kurzrock:Yeah. We do that anyways because its good exercise, but I get your point.F Geyrhalter:... good. And I'm glad to hear that you still do that, but it is fantastic because it so much part of what you're actually offering. There are two numbers that I want to voice to our listeners because I think it's so amazing. In your TEDx talk, you said that we humans waste 40% of all edible food and that to me is just mind blowing. And that only 60% of what we eat actually goes into the human body and 40% goes somewhere else. And the other step, if I want to call that is and I heard that somewhere else and I think it was you who said that too, that only 10% of the ingredients used in the beer making process actually end up in any pint of beer. I hope I didn't misquote you on both of those, but that is amazing.D Kurzrock:Yeah. And all these statistics they're obviously documented, but they're ultimate... I think they're most useful when they're seeing this as like here is sticks and as a way to think about the issue in a more macro sense. So with food waste, ReFED is one of the best resources to look this up. R-E-F-E-D. They did a massive economic and environmental quantification of the food waste problem and that's where that 40% statistic comes from. What's kind of crazy about that is not only the fact that it's like leaving the grocery store with five bags and dropping two in the parking lot on the way to your car. It's that measure actually underestimates the total opportunity as it relates to upcycle because just like with anything that is measured, there has to be a definition, parameters for what is being measured as food waste and food loss.And what upcycling is doing is we're challenging that very definition by saying so what if we're counting wheat that's grown in the field, why are we not counting barley just because it's already been used to brew beer? There's still nutrition that is there. It just requires some innovations and processing and also on the culinary product development side too. And so we actually co-founded an organization called the Upcycled Food Association. It's a nonprofit dedicated to the upcycling piece of the food waste, the food waste movement. And food waste I hinted at this earlier is...So there's another great report that has come out called Project Drawdown and it's a solution focused report that's basically takes a look at all the different potential solutions to achieve and dry down in the atmosphere and reduce just mitigate, but actually reverse the climate change and it's effects. And it ranks through solutions in terms of what's most effective in pressing and food waste is this is right at the top of the list along with... When you combine it with having a more plant based diet, it's not only one of the most impactful solutions against climate change, but it's also something that is in our direct control as consumers.Not all of it. Of course there's systemic issues that drive a lot of these things, but one thing that we all do universally as humans every day is we eat. And we make choices about what we eat and how we eat it and that's something that we really try to champion. ReGrained is bringing another level of consciousness to those choices and to the impact that we can make with them. And so that's part of what we're doing. And the thing is when you're trying to communicate, when you're trying to educate the world, not all of this stuff is going to sit on a package and it's also hard to visualize.So what does 40% of all food look like? What does that mean? 10% of the ingredients used to grow end up in beer? And we also worked at communicating this using other [inaudible 00:31:21] if you also felt like for example, to produce one six pack of beer, just the grain in it takes the equivalent of over 300 gallons of water, which is about... Which is about a two hour shower.F Geyrhalter:Yeah. Mind blowing.D Kurzrock:For one six pack and that grain is just being used today for its poured sugars. And so what we do by sharing things that as I was trying to say, well, isn't it common sense that we should try and rescue that what's left from going to lower uses and put it to its best use at the top of the food recovery hierarchy and feed people.F Geyrhalter:Absolutely and this brings me back to the idea of the platform. So how are... You're basically running two companies in parallel, plus a nonprofit, right?D Kurzrock:Well...F Geyrhalter:Unless that overwhelms you.D Kurzrock:I mean [inaudible 00:32:25] we co-founded a nonprofit. I'm on the board. There's a CEO for that, I'm not [crosstalk 00:32:32]. So the Upcycled Food association. And then ReGrained as platform I mean that you could argue that it's maybe three companies in one, but the strategy is so integrated that it doesn't feel that way. Everything that we're doing affects the whole platform, but I get what you're saying. I mean, it's hard enough to start a consumer packaged goods brand.It's hard enough to try and start an ingredient company or to develop processing technology and the way that we've been able to do a lot of those is also through strategic partnerships pretty early on. We've worked with the USDA to develop our technology for example. We've got a really cool group over there that's focused on healthy processed foods and there's an old story in there about how we met up with USDA and the work that we did together. And that's the reason why we have technology is because of the product of that relationship, not because we're PhDs because we worked with experts.And so we're really trying to do a lot, but it's all very both complicated and simple [crosstalk 00:33:45]. What we're trying to do is do more, we're trying to do more with less. We're trying to help run a system whose system does more with less. Our mission statement you brought that up earlier, is to better align the food we eat with the planet we love and everything really fits under that call to action.F Geyrhalter:And first of all, that's a great statement and it totally connects the brands. So the problem if you would run three different brands to do slightly different things, then it becomes problematic. But if all three brands are perfectly aligned around the same vision and maybe not the same vision, but well the overarching vision for sure, but the underlying mission then certainly everything is much more connected and easier to run because there's no confusion if anyone sees any of the other brands or companies that you're running.Looking back on ReGrained as a consumer product, what was the one big breakthrough moment where you felt like now we're actually a brand, now we actually did it. I don't know which store you would have been in the beginning, maybe whole foods or wherever it was. Was there a moment that you remember where you just sat back with your co-founder and you're like, "I think that's it. I think we're actually making it into a real brand right now."D Kurzrock:No, I can't pinpoint one moment like that. I mean it's has just been almost 10 years since this first entered my brain. We've been building a thing and a lot of times it feels like we've gone through periods where it feels like we're taking two steps forward, one step back. There's periods where it feels like we're taking one step forward, two steps back. You know those periods where it feels we're taking one step forward and one step back and just staying in the same place and that's a tough one. I think most recently though, with the launch of this last product because we actually launched it in March right when the pandemic was... Or at least the lockdown from the pandemic was starting to take hold, which affected retailers.We're still not on the shelves of any stores because they're all still focused on keeping up and not putting new products on the shelf. That'll come later in the year hopefully and so we had to pivot to direct consumer channel. I was super nervous we'd be sitting on a warehouse of product that we couldn't sell because our retail entries are going to go out. And instead we sold through two production runs in a very short amount of time. And I'm seeing really exciting growth on that and part of that experiences is, a huge part of that experience has been enormously stressful and a lot of fun, but it's also been great like we're doing something here, something's working. We're creating a product that people want and that feels good.F Geyrhalter:And if you can point to one thing that made that work, I mean, obviously that's a huge struggle. You thought you had your sales channel all figured out, you have the product ready to be basically shipped and suddenly you have to... Suddenly everything goes online, you're turning into an e-commerce brand. You need to unload this product quickly and make people aware of the product at the same time. What made it work? How did you do that?D Kurzrock:Well, I think it's about building for resiliency from the beginning. And so even though e-commerce wasn't our biggest channel, we had the infrastructure for e-commerce in place and not just e-commerce, but direct to consumer [inaudible 00:37:43]. One of our best partners is a company called Imperfect Foods. They do grocery delivery, also very mission aligned. Incredible company for anyone listening, Imperfect Foods, go look them up. They deliver nationally. We were able to just put more emphasis on these channels that were already, that already existed as opposed to having the world fall apart and saying, "Oh, crap, got to build a website that can take orders now. Got to find a marketing partner."So I think the choices actually has to happen really early on when you say how do I build a resilient business? And part of that, a big part of that is having diversified revenue streams. Another way that we thought about this relatively earlier on is the food service channel was something and especially being in the Bay Area, being able to sell products to tech companies that stock their break rooms with snacks. It's an incredible sales channel, a great way to diversify against retail.Guess what right now doesn't exist. May as well not exist. And so if we were over-indexed as a business towards those channels, that would be also very... So we tried to set up diversified revenue streams from the beginning and I think that is what enabled us to respond. I wouldn't say proactively because it was still catalyzed by this outside force, but we were able to respond with resilience. And not even head start and I don't know if we'll totally get into this, but our capital strategy as well has followed a similar philosophy.F Geyrhalter:Well, I think it's the age old wisdom that myself actually did not know when I started my company and I failed miserably because of that too, is not to put all eggs into a basket. I mean, we had one very large client and we moved very quickly forward with that client. I grew tremendously the company and then something happened and the client left. There was a dispute, there was someone that I fired that they hired and it was really ugly. And suddenly that client was gone and it's this lesson that I think all of us learn in the first years of our business. For me sadly, it was in my first decade of my business. To diversify, to make sure that what you offer, that you offered in very different ways, in different channels to make sure if anything happens, you can pivot to another channel, so it's a big-D Kurzrock:I'm sorry. I'm sorry to hear that you went through that, but I'm sure it helped [crosstalk 00:40:45] get to where you are.F Geyrhalter:... that's how it works. That's how it always works. In business, you have to like you said, it's the two steps back. There was definitely 10 steps back at some point which was really exciting in the pivot and I'm in such a good place now because of that. We're coming slowly to an end. A couple of more questions that I do have on my mind. The first one I always believe that it's important for a company to understand what their DNA is. And when I work with my clients, I try to define it more and more so that at the end of our session and that sometimes a full day session, that we can actually describe the entire brand in a single word.Like Everlane, for instance, is all about transparency, Zappos might all be about service, but if an entire company can just focus on this one word that they themselves feel like they can own within their own space, what would it be for ReGrained and the conglomerate of companies of ReGrained? What could be one word that could describe the brand?D Kurzrock:Well, kind of two words, but it's the same word twice. One thing that comes to mind is just win-win. What we're doing is creating solutions that solve for multiple things at the same time and create shared value. What I almost said was just upcycling, but that's a little too I think on the nose for the question and [inaudible 00:42:39] requires. I recognize that, but that's [inaudible 00:42:46] just off cuff [crosstalk 00:42:48] question.F Geyrhalter:I liked that especially because you know I've done this show for a while now. I'm up to 50 guests or so, and they are a lot of words that keep coming up. Rightfully so like empathy or things like that and win-win is at first. Even though a lot of companies do similar endeavors like yours where it is for the greater good and there's definitely more people winning than only one. Lastly, what is exciting you the most about the future of ReGrained? What are some things that you're doing right now that you can talk about that really get you excited?D Kurzrock:Yeah. There's a lot of really exciting things fortunately. One of the phrases that's been said a lot right now with everything that's going on, I think it has its roots in politics and I don't know who said it first. It's definitely overset right now, but there's this idea of never wasting a good crisis. And as a food system, this pandemic I think was about a wake up call in a lot of ways, and it's also created some fundamental shifts in buying behavior. And I really believe that it creates this opportunity for us to decide together how to emerge stronger from this whole thing.I think upcycling and food waste is really high on the list of concepts that should take off. I mean, there's could have been a lot of ways this whole thing it's been a super acute shock to the system. And it's also kind of a dress rehearsal for some of the impacts of climate change like disruptions in supply chain and so on. And so I'm really excited by some of the work that we're doing with our partners and the products that we're developing, one of them is going to hit the market later this year. That is kind of powered by ReGrained concept and we are very excited for those things now, for essentially the market.The other thing that I'm really excited about it as the Upcycled Food Association right now. We just released the first official definition of food upcycling or edible upcycling as we call it as ReGrained. And then the next step that I'm just so pumped about is a process for defining standards against which to certify products as Upcycled. And that type of well, the branding exercise too. And then as a way of communicating values to the market, I think that there's first to pull the thing off in the way that we wanted that this is a really important milestone. It's a [inaudible 00:45:58] thing that's going to happen this year too and I'm very much excited about that.F Geyrhalter:That is amazing. And that actually ties in nicely into my last question where people can go to regrained.com I assume. That's where they can find you, that's where they can look at your products with your story, learn more about upcycling etc. But what are some ways that you feel people could upcycle more in their own lives when it relates to food, but maybe overall. I think what you said was really poignant. I think it was really important and I do think that there's going to be a huge shift now. And you are kind of at the forefront of the all of this. Besides your product, what are other ways that people can easily start shifting their mindset?D Kurzrock:Yeah. And just be clear, we also really hope that our products are actually just a way to get people's attention, to get them to also start asking those questions themselves. The fact that you got there, with this questions is great. We actually on our website, we have a blog called the upcyclist and on it there's some recipes and things like that. One of the things that I've been saying a lot recently is that I really feel that this new environment for food consumption that we're in with shelter in place and with more people ordering online and eating in and things like that.It's actually a really good opportunity for people to waste less food at home. And to look at it because it's a pain to go to the grocery store right now and it's also a risk. And there's the perception of the risk versus the actual risks and ways to mitigate and things like that too, but the net is that you want to go to the store less right now. And so how do you stretch things longer? And it's a lot of ancient wisdom, these aren't new ideas. It's like if you kind of [inaudible 00:48:06] chicken and you roast it, you have roasted chicken one night and then maybe the next night you used the...F Geyrhalter:Chicken soup.D Kurzrock:The leftovers to make... Soup would be the third thing, the second thing could be like tacos or enchiladas or something and then soup. So how you do the most with what you have when you're trimming vegetables and things like that for stir fries whatever. Can you save the scraps and make something. You can make stock, or there's different way, lots of little tips and tricks that you can do at home. One of my favorite tips for wasting less food at home, it's just an extra simply just two organizational points. One is meal plan. Again, if you want to go to the store less, that's helpful anyways. Plan out your meals, you're less likely to waste when you have a plan. Have a plan and stick with it.For two [inaudible 00:49:01] and so in the fridge, if you could just have one drawer that is a use first drawer and for things that are starting to go bad, put them in that drawer, and then you know when you get there instead of saying what do I want for dinner? The question is what do I have for dinner? What can I make with what I have? And just kind of little shifts like that can have a really big impact in food waste. Put the half of the problem actually happens at home. So if we want to take action on food waste, it's not just about eating upcycle and facilitating food donations and things like that. Also let's be smarter and more efficient with our own purchasing and consumption. Let's get creative, it's fun, it's food, it [crosstalk 00:49:46] can be delicious.F Geyrhalter:And I mean what you just said, a lot of people right now I mean we're moving from the pandemic I guess via riots now into a depression. I mean, yay all us, but we're in a place right now where there is a ginormous amount of Americans at least that are deep in poverty or that they suddenly have to be extremely frugal. So on the one hand, that is definitely something that they are now forced to do and on the other hand, all of us should wake up to that. And I think what you said is exactly true.People are waking up now because they don't want to go out more and they start seeing, "Oh my God, how much do we actually waste?" And a lot of people hoard it. So they've got a full fridge for a family of 10, but they are only two people living in an apartment and they are [crosstalk 00:50:37].D Kurzrock:Yeah. And that's the other side of it. It's how do we also not waste more? And this and so now I've got all kinds of plastic concerns and things like that, but I just hope we do take the opportunity to emerge stronger from this and a lot of this is just common sense. Vegetables are also cheaper than meat and wasting less food, waste less money. And so that's just like there is alignment here between what's good for people and what's good for the planet and I hope that we really lean into that.F Geyrhalter:We're all slowly waking up. It takes a lot I guess for all of us to wake up, but here we are one step at a time. Dan, thank you so much for your time to talk about ReGrained, to talk about the platform that you're building, the nonprofit that you are building, about upcycling altogether and about your entrepreneurial journey. I think it was inspirational on many more levels than just the brand story. So we really appreciate you taking the time on a crazy Monday morning.D Kurzrock:Yeah. My pleasure man. Thanks for having me. Thanks for having me on. It was an energizing conversation.F Geyrhalter:Absolutely. Thanks for being here. I appreciate it. We talk soon then. 

According to the USDA, 30% to 40% of the food goes to waste in the U.S., and the coronavirus pandemic has made this problem worse. We talk to ReFED's executive director about how to reduce waste by food producers and in our own kitchens. Also, the pandemic has strained the capacity of funeral homes and cemeteries. In New Jersey, which has the second-highest rate of COVID-19 deaths, it's having a big impact on workers in the so-called "death care" industry.

Yalmaz Siddiqui is the Vice President of Corporate Sustainability at MGM Resorts International.  He started this role in May 2016 and is responsible for leading a range of environmental sustainability initiatives for the company, including green conventions, food waste reduction, waste management, sustainable sourcing and employee engagement. He is also developing an advanced sustainability strategy framework for MGM Resorts, including metrics and goals, project accountability and roles, and reporting strategy. Yalmaz has a Masters in Environment & Development from the University of Cambridge in England, and a Bachelor of Commerce from McGill University in Canada. Yalmaz joins Sustainable Nation to discuss: Size and scale of impact of MGM Resorts Sustainable purchasing Food waste reduction and overall waste management strategies Advice and recommendations for sustainability leaders Yalmaz's Final Five Questions: 1. What is one piece of advice you'd give other sustainability professionals that might help them in their careers? Well, I'd say first, don't get stuck in false dichotomies and don't let others force you into false dichotomies around sustainability is always more expensive or sustainability means less luxury. Find proof that that is not true because it's not always true. In fact, it's often not true and persuade others using the help in persuading them by showing them politely that their predisposition might might be wrong. I'd also say pilot and scale new initiatives. Don't try and go comprehensive and too ambitious, too quick. 2. What are you most excited about right now in the world of sustainability? I think this function has really matured and corporate America and corporate world in general is really interested in the value this functional area brings to the brands and to our companies more broadly. I think the excitement comes from maybe the emergence of this function as a very real and important thing that matters to major customers matters to employees and increasingly matters to investors. So it's the sort of arrival is a real thing in the corporate world that makes me excited. 3. What is one book you would recommend sustainability professionals read? So I read a lot and there's a lot of books that I could recommend, but I'm going recommend two, if that's okay. Number one is Influence by Robert Cialdini. It's not about environmental sustainability, it's not about corporate purpose, it's about how you influence others. It's got a whole series of lessons that have been extremely useful in my career because ultimately people in these roles or we in our roles have influenced, but we have no authority and so how do you learn from the best thinkers on influence? That's number one. The second would be Resonate by Nancy Duarte. Nancy Duarte's got a consultancy. It was the world's first and still foremost PowerPoint consultancy. She advises on how to craft great PowerPoints. Her message is that PowerPoint is the business world's communications tool, but no one knows how to use it or very few people know how to use it. If you read Resonate, you'll learn how to use it much more effectively than dense bullet points that no one wants to read or that you read when presenting. So read, Resonate and you will resonate more. 4. What are some of your favorite resources or tools that really help you in your work? I think HBR, Harvard Business Review, reading that magazine, reading Fast Company. I'm a member of GreenBiz Executive Network, being part of that and Sustainable Brands. Then thematically on food, I really like to focus on ReFED. In terms of materials, love Ellen MacArthur Foundation's work. Associations, I'll certainly advocate SPLC (Sustainable Purchasing Leadership Council) as one. SPLC, Sustainable Brands, and GreenBiz those are my go to’s. 5. Where can our listeners go to learn more about you and the sustainability work at MGM? Well, I'm the only Yalmaz Siddiqui on LinkedIn. I believe it makes it easy. And then MGMresorts.com/CSR. You can read all about our programs around focusing on what matters, embracing humanity and protecting the planet. About Sustridge  Sustridge is a sustainability consulting firm providing consulting in sustainability strategy development, sustainability reporting, GHG emissions calculating and management, zero waste planning and guidance in a TRUE Zero Waste, B Corp, LEED and Carbon Neutral certification.

Hear from Dana Gunders, Executive Director at ReFED, Emily Broad Lieb, Clinical Professor of Law, Director, Food Law and Policy Clinic and Deputy Director at Harvard Law School, and Justin Block, Managing Director for Feeding America, discuss the short-term and potential long-term impacts that the food supply will have during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Dana Gunders serves as ReFED’s Executive Director. Dana is a national expert and one of the first to bring to light just how much food is wasted across the country. For almost a decade, she was a Senior Scientist at the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC). She then launched Next Course, LLC to strategically advise on the topic. Some of her career highlights include authoring the landmark Wasted report and Waste Free Kitchen Handbook, launching the Save the Food campaign, testifying in Congress, consulting to Google, appearing on John Oliver, and perhaps most importantly, being a founding Board Member of ReFED. https://www.refed.com/?sort=economic-value-per-ton https://savethefood.com/ Waste-Free Kitchen Handbook: A Guide to Eating Well and Saving Money By Wasting Less Food (Zero Waste Home, Zero Waste Book, Sustainable Living Book) https://nexuspmg.com/

Katy Franklin is the Operations Director of ReFED - the only U.S. non-profit wholly dedicated to food waste reduction. It is a think tank that works with decision-makers across the food system to reduce food waste. ReFED’s work provides data-based insights and guidance on food waste and solutions to it.They identify both systems level changes to improve outcomes at a national level and also practical measures to help individuals, businesses and other stakeholders make a meaningful impact on the problem of food waste.Our conversation focusses for some time on ReFED’s 2016 Roadmap - which laid out a route to a 20% reduction in food waste within a decade - and also the online platform that will supersede the Roadmap, the Insights Engine (launching October 2020). If you are interested in the topic I really recommend you download the Roadmap for yourself to look into their findings further.We cover lots of other ground, including:The competitive advantage for businesses who adopt reduction policiesWhy the benefits of reducing food waste are still as available to brands as everWhy education has the biggest positive effect of all on the problem of food wasteWhat businesses serving food can do to educate their customers and other stakeholdersKaty has spent her career working on strategies and systems to effectively reduce food waste at all levels and has authored industry and academic research on food waste and opportunities to address it. I found it really interesting and informative talking to her and I’m sure you will enjoy listening to the conversation too.To take any of the points we discuss further, the best place to start would be the ReFED website: https://www.refed.com/

Katy Franklin is the Operations Director of ReFED - the only U.S. non-profit wholly dedicated to food waste reduction. It is a think tank that works with decision-makers across the food system to reduce food waste. ReFED's work provides data-based insights and guidance on food waste and solutions to it.They identify both systems level changes to improve outcomes at a national level and also practical measures to help individuals, businesses and other stakeholders make a meaningful impact on the problem of food waste.Our conversation focusses for some time on ReFED's 2016 Roadmap - which laid out a route to a 20% reduction in food waste within a decade - and also the online platform that will supersede the Roadmap, the Insights Engine (launching October 2020). If you are interested in the topic I really recommend you download the Roadmap for yourself to look into their findings further.We cover lots of other ground, including:The competitive advantage for businesses who adopt reduction policiesWhy the benefits of reducing food waste are still as available to brands as everWhy education has the biggest positive effect of all on the problem of food wasteWhat businesses serving food can do to educate their customers and other stakeholdersKaty has spent her career working on strategies and systems to effectively reduce food waste at all levels and has authored industry and academic research on food waste and opportunities to address it. I found it really interesting and informative talking to her and I'm sure you will enjoy listening to the conversation too.To take any of the points we discuss further, the best place to start would be the ReFED website: https://www.refed.com/

Meet Amanda Nguyen, the owner and baker behind Butter&, the San Francisco bakery that’s become famous for its Quarantine Cakes. Amanda came up with the idea for these mini cakes decorated with a PSA out of necessity. Her custom cake business relied on weddings, birthdays, and other celebrations, and all of her orders were canceled almost overnight due to the COVID-19 crisis. Tune in to hear how Amanda went from Facebook data analyst to bakery owner and why ethical employment has been such a big issue for her, even pre-coronavirus.Thank you to the Wines of Rioja for supporting Radio Cherry Bombe.And listen to the end to discover why Emily Carter of Imperfect Foods in San Francisco thinks Dana Gunders of ReFED is the Bombe. Photo by Andriya Rances

A 2016 report by ReFed estimated that the U.S. wastes 30% of the food supply representing 126 billion pounds of wasted food annually with a street value of over $161 billion dollars. In 2017, the EPA determined that more food than any other single material was the largest contribution to landfills in the U.S. While I think it's better to have more than enough healthy food at home and waste than to not have enough and you end up eating trash because you're hungry or you consistently run out to buy prepared food instead of saving and investing your money, there is a third and fourth option. Turn your food waste into ingredients for a new recipe or compost it. Episode Resources on the blog at https://rawfoodmealplanner.com/what-to-do-with-your-leftover-almond-pulp

Every year in the US, over 700,000 restaurants throw away 11 million pounds or over 25 billion dollars worth of food. To help turn this around, Sabine Valenga helped found Food For All, a business that sources surplus food from restaurants and lets individuals pick it up for a discount. Sabine's revolutionary business model is helping restaurants dramatically reduce how much food they waste each day and is helping Americans from all walks of life get access to the food they want for less. Learn how Sabine helped start Food For All as a graduate student and why restaurants have so much food waste in the first place. We also get into a delicious solution for surplus herbs, how businesses and nonprofits can actually work together to reduce waste, and what Sabine thinks many people misunderstand about hunger in America. Whether you're an aspiring entrepreneur, a budding environmentalist, or just hungry for ways to save money on convenient meals, this episode has something for you. Show Notes: Learn more about Food for All on their websiteSabine first learned about food waste from the hilarious and eye-opening feature that John Oliver did about it in 2015Food for all tackles waste that happens in restaurants. You can see a graph of where exactly food waste happens from ReFED here Sabine and the Food for All team work closely with the Greater Boston Food Bank. You can learn more about them and support their work here The UN Food and Agriculture Organization found that we'd only need to recover 1/4 of all of the food that we waste globally every year to feed everyone in need on our planetTo help make food more accessible to everyone, regardless of their income level, Imperfect offers a reduced-cost box programThe federal government recently announced its cuts to food stampsSabine's tip for using up extra herbs is to chop them up and combine them with yogurt to make a quick and easy dipSabine is a fan of the work Urban-X is doing to improve life in citiesMy Fresh Bowl is an urban vending machine that serves healthy foodReilly recently had a productivity breakthrough thanks to the Pomodoro techniqueSabine's go-to food to make someone feel loved is Pão de Queijo, a traditional Brazilian cheese breadSabine has not one but 3 go-to karaoke songs!"Just Give Me a Reason" by P!nk"What's Up?" by 4 Non Blondes"Evidências" by Chitãozinho & XororóSabine admires the work of architect Andres Jaque

Find Turner Wyatt, the Upcycled Food Association, Fresh Food Connect, and ReFED here!https://www.turnerwyatt.com/https://www.upcycledfood.org/http://www.freshfoodconnect.org/https://www.refed.com/Subscribe, share, and write a review if you like us! If you have constructive criticism or would like to submit episode or guest ideas, contact us via our website at evolutioneats.org or via email info@evolutioneats.org so we can address your concerns and/or find new ideas to tackle.You can also find us on social media in the following places:Facebook & Instagram: @evolutioneatsTwitter: @evolution_eatsPinterest & LinkedIn: Evolution EatsLink to Drexel study regarding the consumer preference of upcycled ingredients:https://drexel.edu/now/archive/2017/December/Food-Waste-Marketability-Research/

“It takes so many resources to grow, transport, store, cook, and get food to our plates. When we throw food out, we throw those resources out with it.”Dana Gunders (8:10-8:28) The average American throws away around $30 worth of uneaten food every month. When you factor in the food being wasted by restaurants, grocery stores, and other points along the supply chain, it's easy to see how big of a problem this is becoming. Dana Gunders is the author of Waste-Free Kitchen Handbook: A Guide to Eating Well and Saving Money By Wasting Less Food. Her work has been featured on media outlets that include NBC, NPR, CNN, The New York Times, and The Wall Street Journal. Known as the “food waste warrior”, Dana began exploring the issue of food waste while working in the fruit and vegetable industry. Dana was taking part in finding ways to make agriculture more sustainable by reducing the use of water, fertilizer, and energy on farms. She started looking into the waste component and stumbled upon some surprising numbers.  40% of food in this country goes to waste. 25% of its water is used to grow food that's never eaten.  Dana's report titled Wasted: How America Is Losing Up to 40 Percent of Its Food from Farm to Fork to Landfill looks at how food is treated throughout the supply chain. The report played a huge role in bringing the issue of food waste to the public's attention. Dana is the new interim Executive Director Speaker for ReFED, an organization dedicated to addressing the food waste problem in the U.S. Their efforts are geared toward providing data, money, and other resources to enable others to take action on this important issue.  “When you look at all the food that's wasted, households produce most of it. We waste more food than supermarkets, restaurants, farms or anywhere else in the supply chain.” - Dana Gunders (7:10-7:30) Households produce most of this country's food waste, and households with kids tend to have even more food waste. Fruits and vegetables are the number one food product wasted in today's homes. It takes a lot of resources to grow, transport, store, and prepare food. It involves labor and other natural resources. When we throw food out, we throw all of those resources out along with it. Wasted food is equivalent to about 37 million cars worth of greenhouse gases.  If food waste were a country, it would rank number three in terms of its carbon footprint, second to the U.S. and China. In fact, food is actually the number one product entering landfills today, One of the best ways to combat food waste at home is to make smaller shopping trips. There are plenty of options to help you do this. Whether it's curbside pickup, grocery delivery, or the technologies grocers are using to help consumers shop more efficiently.  “When I did bigger shopping trips, it would be the demise of a large portion of my food. My berries and lettuce would freeze because my fridge was stuffed full.” - Janelle Lara (14:31-14:40)Turn a weekly trip to the grocery store into multiple smaller trips. You waste less food at home while saving money by not throwing any food out.  People care about this issue and nobody wants to waste food. But they don't necessarily know what to change in their lives to stop doing it.  The important thing is to start somewhere. Even doing a little bit makes a big difference. Taking the right steps to reduce waste can help you do your part in helping solve this problem. Buying (and eating) fresh fruits and vegetables contributes to your family's health while helping to save our valuable and limited resources.  How to get involved Join The Produce Moms Group on Facebook and continue the discussion every week!  Reach out to us - we'd love to hear more about where you are in life and business! Find out more here.  If you liked this episode, be sure to subscribe and leave a quick review on iTunes. It would mean the world to hear your feedback and we'd love for you to help us spread the word! Transcription:  Tpm79tpm79

At 21, Yasmin is the co-founder and Executive director of RefEd, a student-led project dedicated to providing access to education to refugee children. She explains how forced migration has disrupted the education of millions of children across the world and offers her insight on how to close this gap, sharing steps to be taken locally, nationally and internationally. She also gives a few tools she uses to ensure the organisation stays agile and keeps its core vision in mind every step of the way. A big debate arises during the episode and we need your help to solve it! It's the centuries old stand off - morning people vs night owls, who do you side with? Links: Website: http://bit.ly/YCM_GCM Social media: @WeareGCM Patreon: http://bit.ly/YCM_Patreon Sophie: http://bit.ly/YCM_Sophie GlobalGiving: http://bit.ly/YCM_Support Mentorship: http://bit.ly/YCM_Mentor RefEd: RefEd Initiative: http://bit.ly/YCM_RefEd Support RefEd: http://bit.ly/YCM_Support_RefEd

In this episode, we are discussing innovative technologies and ideas to use wasted food. We interview Katy Franklin, Chief of Staff at ReFed; Amanda Weeks, creator of natural cleaning brand Veles; and Tristram Stuart, a global leader in the fight against food waste.For more information on our guests and the work that they do, check the links below: https://www.refed.com/?sort=economic-value-per-tonhttps://veles.com/https://www.tristramstuart.co.uk/

Food waste is an important topic and Chef Merry tackles this with Angel Veza of ReFED. ReFED is an organization that is committed to reducing food waste in the United States and works with community, business and government leaders to address this issue. Chef Merry and Angel talk about the current status of food waste in our country, the causes of food waste and what ReFED is doing to work on this issue. ReFED has identified 27 ways in which we can reduce food waste in our system. Angel speaks to the trends happening in food waste and what restaurant operators can do to minimize food waste in their operations. By doing so, they can also save money and other resources. And Chef Merry offers his take from a Chef’s perspective on how a restaurant can make an impact. Learn more about ReFED at https://www.refed.com/about

Elizabeth Sturcken leads the work of the Supply Chain EDF + Business team. She works to leverage the power of the marketplace to make every product safer, healthier and better for the environment. She has been at EDF for over 20 years and has led our team of people working with retail and consumer product companies to create broad environmental change in areas including climate change, agriculture, green freight, toxics in products, waste and renewable energy. She leads EDF's work with Walmart and has done so for the past 10 years. She led corporate partnerships with other major companies such as FedEx, to develop the next generation delivery vehicle and UPS, to create more sustainable overnight shipping packaging. Elizabeth’s team includes three people based in Bentonville, AR, three in Washington, DC, two in San Francisco, and one in Raleigh, NC, and one in New York. Elizabeth Joins Sustainable Nation to Discuss: The Supply Chain Solutions Center  EDF's involvement in the development of Walmart's Project Gigaton program and what was learned Importance of science based targets and corporate engagement in climate policy Advice and recommendations for sustainability leaders Highlights from the Interview: The Supply Chain Solutions Center. Tell us a little bit about this tool, how it came about, some features and how this is going to help people as they work sustainability through their supply chain. Let me tell you a story from my work years ago. Work that I'm really proud of. I led a partnership with Fedex to come up with our next generation vehicle which was a phenomenally successful bit of work. We really created a new vehicle in the medium duty truck marketplace and it's ended up rippling through that marketplace. I think we did it faster then the market would do on its own. But at the end of it, despite how successful it was, I just had this realization that this is not fast enough. This is not cutting it. It took six years to do that project and as successful as it was, and as wonderful as it was, the planet can't wait that long. We just need to be doing a lot more scaling of the work and doing it a lot faster. At EDF we collectively came to that realization. Well, EDF created the Supply Chain Solutions Center as an answer to this problem of how to engage many companies on sustainability and help them along this journey. The idea is to make sustainability as easy as using Netflix or Spotify. What we're doing with this Supply Chain Solutions Center is we have beginner, intermediate and expert resources, all sorts of different case studies, templates for building sustainability plans and then also opportunities for connecting with NGO experts. This all covers at this six different areas: agriculture, energy, chemicals, waste, forest and freight. Anybody could create a free profile by going to supplychain.edf.org. We created the Supply Chain Solution Center out of a need that we heard from supply chain professionals and we tried to gather up all of our years of experience in working with companies. We surveyed sustainability professionals ranging from people who are doing the work in the trenches to directors and C-suite executives at leading consumer package good companies and asked them what they need. Their top challenge with implementing sustainable supply chains was finding credible resources quickly that they could use or send to their suppliers. It's just an ongoing challenging need. One factoid that I found both hopeful and alarming is that 50% of Fortune 500 companies have at least one climate or clean energy goal according to calculations by WWF, but only 5% have goals on the scale science says is needed. So, everybody on this journey needs more help. Just as Netflix doesn't offer just movies from one studio or Spotify doesn't just promote one record label, the Supply Chain Solutions Center is meant to gather resources from many different parts. Over ten NGOs are contributing resources to the site and it's just a real product of collaboration. EDF has birthed this baby, but everyone is helping to make it thrive. The NGOs that have contributed resources are Business for Social Responsibility, the Sustainable Purchasing Leadership Council, Sustainable Packaging Coalition, Further with Food, Conservation International, Field to Market, The Sustainability Consortium, CDP, ReFED, Greenbiz group and Shelton Group. So, it's a phenomenal collection of resources all together in one place and done in a way that people can get at the content that they really need. Tell us about what you are seeing with companies setting sustainability targets in their supply chain and how your tool can help companies with this? The one thing that will differentiate companies that is the make or break thing in achieving sustainability is a public goal. That is so critical. If I had to urge companies to do one thing, I would say try and set an aggressive yet achievable sustainability target. Because what we've known really in companies for years is setting clear goals makes you drive towards them. You have to have goals that are appropriate. You want them to be achievable but you want them to stretch you. The other critical piece, given that we're talking about our planet and a healthy planet, is they need to be in line with what the science tells us is needed, and not just on climate but on chemicals of concern, water use and all sorts of different issues. So, really trying to follow the science and use the best available science is critical. I think the Science Based Target Initiative is a great resource and many companies are starting to do that. That's really what's needed. Now, that doesn't mean that if a company isn't at that point, they shouldn't set some goals. Set some goals, get going, get your feet wet, use the Supply Chain Solution Center and try to figure out what you can do. You can tailor the content for the beginning of your journey and you'll get what you need in order to figure appropriate goal setting. If you're further along, you want to try and set more aggressive goals, you want to do a materiality assessment and figure out what are the key issues that you need to focus on. The resources are there in the Supply Chain Solutions Center. I will emphasize to let data be your guide. Find out where your big hotspots are in your supply chain and in your operations. I think that that's one thing that I've learned over and over again from my work with companies, and most recently in our partnership with Walmart. We worked with Walmart to set the first supply chain carbon reduction goal in 2010. We all thought thought it would be a little easier than it turned out to be. They had just come off of exceeding their goal to sell a hundred million CFL light bulbs and then thought there's a lot of opportunity in the supply chain for greenhouse gas reduction. Yes there is, but the truth is that achieving the reductions is a lot harder than than you expect it to be. It definitely takes hard work, but I think our real breakthrough came when we started using data to look across their supply chain for all their different product categories. For example, we figured out fertilizer was a really big hot spot given how much food they sell and given how greenhouse gas intensive fertilizer is. So, the light bulbs went off and we realized this is a huge area of opportunity for us and for Walmart to engage it's food and ag suppliers who produce all the food that they sell. So, having science based targets, having rigorous goals and using data to figure out where to focus is important. Focus on the big boulders first and let the pebbles come later. I think that part is really critical. What is one piece of advice you would give other sustainability professionals that might help them in their careers? Ask for help. I know that lots of nonprofits and NGOs like EDF want to help. We work with a number of other really excellent NGOs like WWF, TNC and groups that also focus on specific issue areas. They want to help so don't be afraid to admit that you need help and work together. What are you most excited about? Right now in the world of sustainability? The most exciting project I've led here is our work with Walmart on Project Gigaton. I guess I'm feeling like the most exciting thing that I'm seeing is it feels like people are really becoming aware that we need to act and I'm very hopeful and inspired by companies that continue to step up. I mentioned Walmart and Project Gigaton. Target just set their are science based goal and they committed to engaging their supply chain to set science based targets themselves. These are companies, along with Mcdonald's, who are just really leading and they're really big powerful companies that are setting the bar high. It's also important to make the point that right now sustainability leadership requires policy engagement by companies, and that's an area where very few companies are leading right now. The reality is that we will not get to where we need to go with just voluntary corporate action. We need policy to bring up the floor and create change and bring every company along. What is one book you would recommend sustainability professionals read? I recommend a brand new book that I just got. It was written by Bob Langert who ran sustainability at Mcdonald's for years. It's called The Battle to Do Good and it's excellent. I heard that you interviewed Bob for this podcast so I'm putting a plug in for folks to listen to that podcast. Bob worked at Mcdonald's for over 25 years and he was the person that EDF partnered with when we together created the model of corporate NGO partnerships. It really takes you through the journey of one person's attempt to change a whole company and who he partnered with and how he did it. What are some of your favorite resources or tools that really help you in your work? I guess I'd give a shout out to Greenbiz because I feel like they have been around forever and they are the go to resource. You read Joel's newsletter every Monday morning and it just hits the mark and it's really interesting. I highly recommend Greenbiz. One thing that I feel is important to highlight is what I'm seeing with my team, and that is that we're living in times that are really stressful. We're hearing a report every other week about climate catastrophe. There are horrible floodings in the Midwest. I live in San Francisco and we couldn't go outside and breathe the air two years in a row because the wildfires were so bad because of climate change. It can be really overwhelming, especially when you feel like things are going backwards in the country. I really believe that taking care of yourself and doing what you need to do to maintain your sense of balance and perspective is so critical because we can't fight this fight if we can't bring our whole selves to work and fight. So, take your vacation time, go read a really good fun, fluffy novel or whatever. I honestly think that that is as critical as a tool or support for people doing sustainability work is just take care of yourself. Go do that yoga retreat and exercise. We've got to be our best selves in doing this really important work. Where can people go to learn more about you, your work at EDF and where can they find the Supply Chain Solutions Tool? Our blog has lots of tips and our take on the corporate sustainability news of the day. You can check it out at business.EDF.orgblog. I'm on LinkedIn and my Twitter handle is @ESturckenurken. The Supply Chain Solutions Center is at: supplychain.edf.org. Please go and visit, use its resources and let us know what you think. About Sustridge Sustridge is a sustainability consulting firm providing consulting in sustainability strategy development, GHG emissions calculating and management, zero waste planning and guidance in TRUE Zero Waste, B Corp, LEED and Carbon Neutral certification.  

Our feature interview for our March 2019 episode of Paris GOODfood+wine which is with Restaurant Critic Extraordinaire, Andy Hayler. Mr Hayler, a UK resident, has dined in every 3 Michelin star restaurant in the world. CBD Edibles Tutorial: As you already know, if you listened to my last show, I have just released a cookbook, Le CBD Café Cookbook, that infuses quick'n'easy recipes with CBD oil. The CBD Edibles market in the US and even globally is exploding. So my cookbook, Le CBD Café Cookbook, is a way for you to jump on the beneficial and non-narcotic CBD train and incorporate this holistic food supplement, as it has been designated by the US FDA, into your and your family's and even your pets' daily healthy meals. Food Waste in Paris: Food waste innovators create real benefits by reducing natural resource use, cutting greenhouse gas emissions, providing food to the hungry, and offering cost savings to consumers and businesses. That excerpt is from the ReFed website. You can find the link on our shownotes at LocalFoodAndWine.wordpress.com Click on Episode 45 of Paris GOODfood+wine. And, for innovative IoT Solutions to your food perishables transport and Cold Chain logistics issues contact us at IoTShipping.xyz. All music free of rights and provided by FreeSoundTrack.com and Intro/Outro Music by BensoundMusic. Show Notes: http://localfoodandwine.wordpress.com Contact Paige Donner, Host-Producer: http://paigedonner.info Read More @ParisFoodWine and on Instagram @PaigeFoodWine

Imagine if the focus of your work was to identify the most promising entrepreneurs, those who could potentially develop transformative and scalable food and agriculture solutions. Imagine working closely with those entrepreneurs as their ideas blossom and their businesses develop, promote organic gardening effort to tackle food insecurity and Silicon Valley to accompany that converts organic waste in the compostable bioplastic. How fun would this be? Such is the work of Renske Lynde, director of Food Systems 6, a nonprofit California public benefit corporation based in the San Francisco Bay area, whose mission is to support promising entrepreneurs who want to transform how we grow, produce and distribute food. About Renske Lynde Renske has more than 20 years of experience working in the nonprofit sector on food, agriculture, and nutrition policy issues. Her work has included grassroots education and community organizing, strategic campaign development, quantitative policy analysis and legislative advocacy. She co-founded Food System 6 with serial entrepreneur Peter Hertz and now runs 16-week mentoring programs for aspiring entrepreneurs, offering them business and organizational support, tools, training and mentorship. Renske holds a bachelor degree from Boston University and a Master's degree in public policy from the University of California at Berkeley's Goldman School of Public Policy, and served in the Peace Corps. She began her career in Minneapolis at the Institute for Agriculture and trade policy working on behalf of small scale sustainable agriculture producers and went on to build direct markets for Pennsylvania farmers in the Philadelphia marketplace. How has your background in food policy informed the work that you're doing in the innovation and entrepreneur space? That's a great question. So, you know, as you know, Kelly, given your own legendary background in food and nutrition and agriculture policy, the landscape in food and agriculture is one that is very dynamic and there really is, in my mind, no other system that really represents the way in which the public sector, the private sector and the social sector really interact than in the food system. I've always been interested in solving problems at scale, thinking about how we can make our food system work for more people, both those who steward our land and really shepherd it towards sustainable objectives, all the way through to those people in our communities that don't have enough access to food. And really thinking about scale around that and you know, certainly sought the policy path as a means by which I could think about solving those problems at scale. And you know, that, that background and the time that I spent working in food and agriculture policy for around 20 years really does help me also better support the entrepreneurs that are trying to innovate and bring really transformative solutions into the space. Who may have incredibly deep technical knowledge or technological expertise, business backgrounds but aren't necessarily as up to speed on some of the complexities of the system and the ways in which you know, the system interacts with these other sectors. And of course, and in fact the regulatory landscape that really is wrapped around all of the companies that I'm ultimately supporting. Could you give us some examples of the kinds of entrepreneurs that you have supported over the years? I would love to. So I'm in the very fortunate position of supporting now 23 different portfolio companies. We have 17 for profit startups in our portfolio and six nonprofit organizations. And we're really excited about what we believe is an important interplay of change makers. And so that's a big part of the reason we support both for profit and nonprofit entrepreneurs and leaders. You mentioned, in your opener, a company called Full Cycle Bioplastics which is working to transform, and has developed, the technology to transform all forms of food waste and what are known as cellulosic materials, so cardboards and things of that nature, into a completely biodegradable and fully compostable bioplastic alternative that can be used for packaging. So, there's obviously right now an incredible amount of attention being paid to both of these problems that this company is poised to bring a transformative solution towards both mitigating food waste and tackling some of the really detrimental effects of plastic pollution in our oceans. So it's also very consistent with a lot of what we're seeing out there as far as a closed loop approach is concerned. Another in our portfolio that I can describe that is working to identify where is there an opportunity to extract value in this system and in the different processes associated with food production, distribution and consumption so that we might better close the loops so to speak. And kind of move our system from a really linear and extractive one to one that is more circular and really does take into account the virtuous cycle that can be brought into life. When you, when you think about where is value and where and how can that be captured. That's one example. Happy to give more of course that there's, there's many. So I'll let you tell me if there's time to talk about more. You must have a million ideas cross your desk and come to your attention. How do we make decisions on what might create the most benefit? What is most likely to succeed? What's most feasible? You're asking me at exactly the right time because we're in the process right now of reviewing all the applications that we've received for our next formal cohort program. That's the 16-week program that you referenced in the introduction and our next program will begin in February. And first and foremost, I will say it is a while, a complex task, it is, I think a very enviable one. Because we are seeing some unbelievably interesting solutions really coming from all over the world. What we call top of funnel. Our pipeline of innovations and entrepreneurs numbers around a thousand at this point. At this point, it's just a question of our being able to manage all the data that's coming in. So we're really excited about what we're seeing as far as the decision making process. First and foremost, for us as a nonprofit focused on impact and really driven by our mission, we're looking for that kind of alignment. So we want to understand that an entrepreneur is equally as passionate about really delivering a positive and demonstrable impact on some key dimension of our food system. That could be either a social impact, obviously an environmental one, and then clearly we're looking also at human health outcomes. That's our first screen. We have to start there. There's lots of amazing innovations that cross our desks that really aren't necessarily thinking about transforming the system. They may be a better-for-you cupcake, which is great and we think that that's certainly an improvement over the less-better-for-you cupcake, but we're really looking for some of the truly game-changing innovations that stand a chance at transforming the system in some really meaningful way. So that's where we start. Then it goes from there to really analyze and assess is the business ready for our support? Meaning, can we be helpful? So at the very early stages of a company's lifespan, when it's an idea, basically we're less positioned to help at that point. We certainly talked entrepreneurs that are in that stage of 'I have an idea and I really want to do something with it' because that passion is really important. If we can, we do offer advice or guidance or simple suggestions on next steps, but really for us, we need to know and see some demonstrated traction in the marketplace. So some customer, and again, we support both for profit or nonprofit, somebody who has made it clear that they really are in need of this service and are in some way, shape, or form, already engaging in the market, It was interesting to hear that the passion of entrepreneurs is an important part of this and I imagine the entrepreneurs that you are working with come with much different levels of experience from one another. So what kind of training do you provide them during these 16 weeks? That's a great question. And yes, that's absolutely the case. Certainly, especially when you're working in the early stage with companies there, often teams of anywhere from one to five, so they're quite small. Five would be a luxury for some of the companies that we've supported at their earliest stages. And so they certainly do have a lot of talent and vision and mission in terms of the product or service. But there's so much that's missing of course, and so much that's needed to help them move beyond that initial traction in the marketplace to moving towards the necessary steps for scale. So first and foremost, again, we focus on their individual needs. So the company, what is the team, what are their strengths, what are some of the areas that they know that they need support on, what are some of the next major milestones that they're working towards as a company? And we go from there to help build a program that really supports their individual needs. We roll up our sleeves and we really get to know these companies over that 16 weeks so that we're positioned to help them for two to three years after they leave our program. Another big part of what we do is we want to build a community that was a big part of our mission. When we were founded, we believed that there wasn't a community of change makers out there that was really designed to support these kinds of innovative thinkers and these entrepreneurs. So we were really focused on creating a collaborative environment and an ecosystem where entrepreneurs are eager and willing to lean in and help each other. We do bring our companies together for three sessions in person over the course of our programming. And that is very robust programming that is designed to be helpful to any of the companies that we're supporting. So storytelling, public speaking, interaction with a wide range of different types of legal support, brand, visual identity development. How do you put your story out in the world on your website. Things of that nature. That's really where we have the opportunity to add value to the full group, and again, really start to foster some of the connections between them. And it's one of the areas that we believe represents a real significant opportunity for building a strong constituent base around policy advocacy. So that's a particular passion of mine. We definitely spend time talking to all of our entrepreneurs about the food policy world. What it means and ways in which they can both individually and internally in their companies think about some of these bigger issues in the food system. But then also externally, what can they do, how can they be in many ways some of the strongest advocates because they're living and breathing the change that they want to see happen. Could we get your opinion on this kind of reciprocal relationship between entrepreneurs and policy? Are there particular areas of policy where you see entrepreneurs gaining traction? I think there's a wide range of sort of perspectives on what comes first and you know, in terms of the kind of change that we want to see happen in the vision we hold for the food system. But I can certainly say that for example, food waste that we talked about that beginning of the call. Over the last five years, that is a topic that has just exploded onto the national landscape from a variety of different sectors in large part due to the pioneering work of Refed, which is a nonprofit that really brought together many different stakeholders. Including policymakers, investors, entrepreneurs, etc. to really identify how we could collectively as a country reduce food waste by a specific percentage, by a specific date. And I think that's one of the most interesting areas right now, given how much public awareness there is, how much consumer demand there is for alternatives. Companies like Imperfect Produce I think are really meeting a need for consumers to both feel good about the fact that they're helping mitigate food waste by buying fruits and vegetables that would otherwise have gone to waste, but also are able to provide their families a healthier, fresher alternative. So that's an example of an innovation that can be bolstered and supported by some of the regulations that we see coming down both on the state and federal level that are really designed around creating incentives to support those kinds of innovation. So yeah, that's one area that obviously has a lot of great effort and momentum behind it where I think some of the most interesting work is happening. Are there places where policy changes could support entrepreneurs better? Oh gosh, sure. The answer is definitely yes. I think it's just a question of thinking about by what means. So for example, some of the incentives that my home state of California is putting into place around both carbon emissions and mitigating carbon emissions and looking for identifying ways in which we can be reducing carbon in the atmosphere, really can kick start and galvanize an entire community of innovators that are bringing solutions into the market that can help support those objectives. And this obviously extends well beyond the food system, but that's clearly the system I know the best. Similarly initiatives at my state level here in California that are focused on investing in healthy soils with a clear recognition that we need to be investing in soil health and soil fertility, for all of the many benefits that are associated with that. Again, also can help spur innovation activity that can help meet those objectives either for companies or for farmers or ranchers. So those are the top of mind things, but there are many more when we think about our current production system and what we call Food System 5 and the industrialized food system. There are certainly areas of regulation and policy that if altered or adopted as far as requirements are concerned, really can help spur more innovative activity, Let's discuss the training that you provide people because, we're especially interested in the connections these entrepreneurs might form with one another. Do those end up being important personally and professionally for the individuals? Yes, there's no question. So, we often say we're really here to provide the container of support: management, consulting, those types of services. But ultimately, the entrepreneurs who are really the ones who are living their experience, day in and day out, of building solutions often in markets that don't exist. That can often be a very lonely task. You can feel very isolated. You are talking and living and breathing in a world that many people don't understand because they just simply aren't up to speed on things like: why do we need insects as an alternative protein source? That's a hard thing to explain to people. You're really heads down trying to build your business. It's important for both morale and for just sharing information. They are constantly interacting with different parts of the marketplace and that's really important data and knowledge and information they can share. So we see a lot of this happening. We see a lot of our entrepreneurs saying: 'hey, I just met with this retailer, or I just had this experience with this investor. And they put this term sheet forward and I didn't necessarily understand it, so I got some help, and here's what I'm thinking.' There's a real giver mentality certainly amongst the entrepreneurs that we support and in general, I think that this is the case. If you're doing something that is out to change the world, you're often a little on the fringes of what the world is currently looks like. Having that kind of community to really lean in and help support you on the really nitty gritty of building a business. Because they're solving a problem that somebody else has solved before, as well as just kind of the content and the overall change making that the entrepreneurs that we support are really looking to do in the world. It's really important.   Produced by Deborah Hill at the Duke World Food Policy Center

The Boys break down Conference Championship weekend in excruciating detail, more Brady worship, heroes, villains, scapegoats and more on this weeks episode of the Green Mt Sports Roundup

The statistics on food waste are alarming. Nearly all Americans are guilty of tossing edible food both before and after it hits their plates. The good news is, it’s easy to make small changes that can save a family of four up to $1,500 a year in food bills. In the second episode of the Envision Group: Sustainability Podcast Series, our special guest Chris Cochran from ReFED shares pro-tips on reducing waste in both commercial and home kitchens. Compass Group serves 9.8 million meals a day across North America. As the largest foodservice company in the world, we have an obligation to fight food waste. Celebrate with us April 27th, for international Stop Food Waste Day, where we all come together to make small changes that collectively have a big impact. To learn more, visit www.stopfoodwasteday.com and listen to our next podcast dedicated to food recovery.  Internal associates can also visit MyCompass for guides and marketing materials.  We want to hear from you! Be sure to send us your comments and feedback via email: envisiongroup@compass-usa.com.

What is going on? Why all  that wasted food? One in six people in Los Angeles copes with food insecurity, the state of being without reliable access to a sufficient quantity of affordable, nutritious food. Why is the food they need tossed away?There are a lot of reasons. In this podcast episode, you'll meet two people are working on solutions.Luis Yepiz is the wholesale food recovery manager for an organization called Food Forward. Food Forward started by collecting unharvested fruit from backyard orchards and distributing it to community centers. The organization has since expanded to large-scale programs to recover food at farmers markets and wholesale markets. This is food that might be blemished or hard to sell and that might be thrown away. That’s where Luis steps in. Each year, the program he runs at the Los Angeles Wholesale Market collects food valued at $13 - 15 million and distributes the produce to neighborhood residents who don’t have ready access to fresh food.At the time of our interivew, Eva Goulbourne was the director of business and multi-stakeholder programs for ReFED, a nonprofit committed to reducing U.S. food waste. She was working on a roadmap toward behavior change — change needed from you and me, from restaurants, and food distributors.A large social engineering project is needed, a way to convince us to buy food more responsibly, use the food we have and don't throw away food that is perfectly good. Restaurants and distributors need a similar reframing of their supply chain.Eva comes at this problem from the policy side, Luis from the activist side. They tell their stories in the podcast, and you'll find out what simple things you can do every day to save food.Get show notes and more at futurefood.fm. Subscribe to our newsletter and never miss a podcast. 

Stephanie & Nick will be joined byTerry Hand. He will talk about the BC Refed Party Platform & Direct Democracy.

This is the SHORT VERSION session 01 of the Wasted Food Series. Think of it as the Cliff Notes version. It features the most actionable take-aways from the longer interview. It's a great way to introduce people to the issue with little time invested. Today we meet Chris Hunt of ReFED: Rethinking Food Waste through Education and Data. We discuss how in the US, about 40% of our food goes to waste due to confusion over food labeling "eat by" dates, rejection of imperfect produce by groceries, lack of cold storage in food banks and many other reasons. We learn how we reduce food waste in half in as little as 10 years by applying the solutions offered in ReFED's Roadmap: Food Waste Prevention Solutions, Food Waste Recovery Solutions and Food Waste Recycling Solutions.  

This is session 01 of the Wasted Food Series. Today we meet Chris Hunt of ReFED: Rethinking Food Waste through Education and Data. We discuss how in the US, about 40% of our food goes to waste due to confusion over food labeling "eat by" dates, rejection of imperfect produce by groceries, lack of cold storage in food banks and many other reasons. We learn how we reduce food waste in half in as little as 10 years by applying the solutions offered in ReFED's Roadmap: Food Waste Prevention Solutions, Food Waste Recovery Solutions and Food Waste Recycling Solutions.