How Campbell’s, ConAgra Foods, Yum! Brands Cut Food Waste

grocery isle

by | Nov 3, 2015

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grocery isleFood manufacturers, food retailers and restaurants can learn practical steps, best practices and examples of how to reduce food waste with a guide by the Food Waste Reduction Alliance.

The second annual Best Practices and Emerging Solutions guide highlights ways companies can begin or expand their food donation or food waste diversion programs. Compiled by FWRA, a cross-sector industry initiative led by the Food Marketing Institute, the Grocery Manufacturers Association and the National Restaurant Association, the guide focuses on strategies food manufacturers, retailers and restaurant and foodservice operators can employ to keep food out of landfills, and to reduce food waste at the source.

The guide includes more than 30 member companies throughout the food chain such as:

  • The Campbell Soup Company’s partnership with the Food Bank of South Jersey and the New Jersey agricultural community in which undersized peaches headed for landfill were given new life as shelf-stable peach salsa. Just Peachy is sold at retail with proceeds benefitting the Food Bank of South Jersey.
  • ConAgra Foods’s strategy to change the way they transition from one pudding flavor to another in a manufacturing facility by creating blended flavors rather than waste product while flushing the manufacturing line from one flavor to another. The mixed-flavor pudding is now donated, reducing manufacturing loss and getting food to those in need.
  • Reductions in food waste seen by food service operators such as Aramark and Sodexo just by getting rid of trays in dining halls and cafeterias.
  • Darden Restaurants’ and Yum! Brands’ partnership with the Food Donation Connection to establish the Darden Harvest and Yum! Harvest programs, which coordinate food donations to food banks and other charitable organizations as an alternative to discarding prepared foods.
  • Supermarkets such as Hannaford Supermarkets and Weiss Markets are improving their food donation programs, enabling them to share best practices and helping other companies do the same.

In September, food retailers and agriculture companies including Kellogg, Sodexo, Wegmans Food Markets and Albertsons voiced their support or the US’ first-ever national food waste reduction goal, which calls for a 50 percent reduction by 2030.

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