This is a transcript of the Gastropod episode From Trash to Treasure: Why’s It So Hard to Save Restaurant Leftovers From the Dumpster?, first released on October 17, 2024. It is provided as a courtesy and may contain errors.

KEN BAKER: One thing that came in my early days at Rethink was this cinnamon-flavored banana cream concentrate. It was like these five gallon like vats of it. And we got like a whole pallet of it in.

NICOLA TWILLEY: Holy moly, that sounds disgusting.

CYNTHIA GRABER: Not my favorite thing to eat either, but in this case, it was an opportunity: an opportunity to take something that might have gone into the trash and turn it into something delicious.

TWILLEY: I do love delicious, and I also love keeping food out of the trash. And I of course am Nicola Twilley.

GRABER: And I’m Cynthia Graber, and this is Gastropod, the podcast that looks at food through the lens of science and history. This episode: why does it matter if we keep banana cream concentrate out of the trash?

TWILLEY: That’s just one of the many random things that a restaurant might find itself with more of than it can use. And the dumpster beckons—which is a tragedy on many levels. But is there anything that we, or that restaurants, or that our elected officials can and should be doing about it?

GRABER: As it turns out, there are a bunch of new, exciting approaches to helping restaurants cut down on waste, AND get what’s still edible—like, say, leftover pizza or maybe some banana cream concentrate—get it all to people who need it.

TWILLEY: And we’re going to check out some of these cool new ideas in person! This episode of Gastropod is supported in part by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation for the Public Understanding of Science, Technology, and Economics. Gastropod is part of the Vox Media Podcast Network, in partnership with Eater.

[MUSIC]

DANA GUNDERS: So across the US, we waste so much food. We estimate that about 38 percent of all our food never gets eaten. That is over $450 billion worth of food, and it has a huge impact.

GRABER: That’s Dana Gunders, she’s the president at ReFed, it’s a nonprofit that was founded in 2015 to figure out evidence-based ways to reduce food waste.

TWILLEY: And that 450 billion dollar number—that is a huge amount of food. It’s millions and millions of tons. Nearly a quarter of everything we put in our overstuffed landfills is food.

GUNDERS: Food is the number one product entering our landfills today.

GRABER: Throwing out all that food has huge environmental implications. ReFed estimates that about six percent of greenhouse gas emissions come from wasting food, mostly from methane created in landfills. Also think of the land use, Dana said it takes the equivalent of the entire states of New York and California to grow that much wasted food.

GUNDERS: It takes so much to get food to our tables. And when we’re not eating that, all of that is for naught, and really goes to waste.

TWILLEY: Food gets thrown out at all stages of its journey from farm to table. So are restaurants really the main culprit?

GUNDERS: Altogether, the waste from that sector is about 13 percent of all of the waste around by weight, by tons. But it is almost 30 percent by value. And if you just look at the quantity and what that means, that’s over 20 billion meals that are being thrown out in restaurants across the country.

GRABER: So it’s not the largest percentage of our food waste, but it’s still important. And as Dana says, it’s actually more economically valuable than other kinds of food waste, because so much more labor went into it. So solving the problem of restaurant waste matters.

TWILLEY: To understand what to do about restaurant food waste, it helps to get granular. Like, what is causing all that waste? Where in the restaurant is it coming from?

GUNDERS: What’s really interesting about that is that about 70 percent of that is food that is already served, and on people’s plates. And so when we look at this problem, we see a huge opportunity to address what we call plate waste.

GRABER: Huge opportunity? Really? To me it seems like plate waste would be challenging to solve, because it’s like what do you do about people just not eating all the food on their plates. But Dana says there are some smart ways to deal with this.

TWILLEY: Setting up the infrastructure to get that waste, say, composted or fed to pigs or even turned into biofuel—all or any of that is better than putting it into a landfill. But Dana’s preferred solutions start before the food even hits the plate.

GUNDERS: Yeah, when I look at the plate waste problem, my head first goes to, how do we not have as much of this in the first place, right? And, quickly I get to how big portions are in this country. And how much they’ve grown over time.

GRABER: There are a few restaurants and restaurant chains that are trying to deal with this by offering some options that are literally smaller portion sizes.

GUNDERS: So Panera offers half sandwiches. You have Wingstop, that has kind of a wings calculator and you can order, you know, wings by the number.

TWILLEY: TGI Friday’s trialed this idea a while back—they developed a special line of meals called Right Portion Right Price, 30 percent less food for a 30 percent discount

VOICEOVER: Give me a massive amount of flavor, for a smaller portion and price. Life is short. Give me more Fridays.

TWILLEY: Awesome sauce. But just from a quick flip through my recent dining experiences, I’m here to tell you that 99 percent of restaurants don’t do this.

GUNDERS: And that is because, if we’re honest about it, restaurants make more money when they sell more food. If I’m an average restaurant, I can sell you a plate of spaghetti that’s ten inches for ten dollars, or I could sell you a plate of spaghetti that’s on a 12 inch plate filled for fifteen dollars, right? That extra spaghetti doesn’t cost me very much money. So I would rather sell you a bigger plate of food for more money.

GRABER: In fact it’s really one of the only ways restaurants CAN raise prices, is to make plates bigger and then charge more.

TWILLEY: And people in America have been trained to see large portions as *the* marker of value for money. When Friday’s first introduced their “right portion, right price” menu, NPR visited a restaurant to see how it went down, and some people were definitely not into it.

ANITA: I think that the people who may go for this menu is people who are concerned about control. Like I can’t eat half of anything, so I’m just going to let someone else make that decision for me. But I think that’s not really the American way. To allow other people to make decisions for them.

PATEL: Anita’s daughter, Francesca, also viewed portion control as an assault on her inalienable right to eat as much as she wants.

FRANCESCA: It’s a free country.

GRABER: Despite Francesca and her mom’s concern, Friday’s did keep this option for smaller portions going for a while, but they seem to have just dropped it. No more smaller portions. It’s basically back to one size is… too much.

TWILLEY: Which is too bad because that was a cool idea. I’d actually hoped more restaurants would start doing it.

GRABER: Or even just let you know what you were getting in advance. Nicky and I were on a reporting trip recently, and if we’d seen the breakfast burrito at one spot before we ordered, I wouldn’t have gotten my own dish, I’d just have eaten half of hers.

GUNDERS: We’ve all had that experience where you go in a restaurant and everybody orders a sandwich and then they come and you’re like, ohhh, I did not realize they were—these were going to be so big. And we, if I did, I would have shared this

TWILLEY: The tater tots were all mine though. Some things cannot be shared. Also, not to be persnickety, but giving new customers that kind of portion size information is not easy. Dana pointed out you could have pictures on the menu, but it’s still hard to judge size.

GRABER: Luckily, Dana said there are other things restaurants can do to try to prevent plate waste.

GUNDERS: Just offering things a la carte, right? Kind of that, that old school, like letting people choose their sides, or choose not to have sides at all. And then there’s also been a few folks who have tried reducing initial quantities, but offering free refills. So you think about, like, a breakfast platter with potatoes. Potatoes are always kind of left on the breakfast platter. Well, what about serving fewer potatoes, but offering free refills?

TWILLEY: I think I could accept that, even if it was tater tots.

GRABER: All the tater tots you can eat, in smaller portions. And honestly, that’s worked for some restaurants. The ones who’ve done that find that they use up a lot fewer potatoes, there’s a lot less waste, and anyone who really wants more can get it.

TWILLEY: Which eases the anxiety of people who feel like they don’t want to pay for potatoes and leave hungry.

GRABER: But clearly this is still not widespread, so there’s a lot of room improvement there. But Dana also pointed out my personal, most frequent solution: she says eaters could just take home their leftovers.

GUNDERS: It always shocks me that not everybody does this, because I think it’s like the best—the, the only true free lunch out there.

TWILLEY: Especially when that lunch is a tater tot sandwich.

GRABER: Enough with the tater tots! All of these are effective at reducing plate waste. But there’s one that we haven’t mentioned yet that’s probably been the most successful move of all, and it’s getting rid of trays.

TWILLEY: This strategy is obviously only applicable in all-you-can-eat places that have trays—college and corporate cafeterias, mostly, some buffets. But if you can do it, it really has a huge impact. Places have found just getting rid of trays can cut their plate waste by as much as half.

GRABER: This came to the attention of food providers and companies and campuses just over a decade ago, and since then nearly three quarters of universities have dropped trays. Which is a big deal in terms of food waste.

TWILLEY: Rutgers University even made a little video celebrating their success getting rid of trays.

DISH ROOM ATTENDANT: Before, the trays used to look really full. Usually two plates at least, or three. And a lot of time those would get sent through on the belt to the dish room still full with food.

STUDENT: I feel like you eat with your eyes. And you see something you say you want it, but by the time you’re about to eat it, you’re already full. Being that we don’t have trays anymore, people are more conscious about what they’re putting on their plates.

TWILLEY: So that’s a real win. But even with all these solutions, plate waste is still the biggest chunk of restaurant food waste, and probably the hardest to solve.

GUNDERS: To me, plate waste is the uncracked nut of the food waste picture, writ large.

GRABER: Okay, so it’s still a challenge to prevent people from leaving stuff on their plates. But there’s got to be something better to do with that and all the other food waste a restaurant creates—there’s got to be something better to do with it than toss it in a landfill. That’s coming up, after the break.

[BREAK]

TWILLEY: So there’s plate waste, that’s a huge issue. But there also are lots of other places where food gets tossed at a restaurant. Some waste just gets generated during prep: potato peels, the outer leaves of lettuces, lemon rinds. All of that is primo material for the compost pile, but that is not usually what’s happening to it. Compost is great, but…

GUNDERS: It is also probably one of the most expensive things to do, and it really requires government levels of funding to do it.

GRABER: We talked about this in our compost episode. There’s a lot of logistics involved in collecting food from around a city or a state, and getting the appropriate sites set up to take that food. It takes time, space, and work to turn that food into something useful, and that all costs money.

GUNDERS: So when you look at like, what are the sticks that we can look at around this? It tends to be more about banning food from landfills, and just not allowing it.

TWILLEY: And that’s now happening in a few places in the US.

JOURNALIST: The state of Vermont, which has long supported green initiatives, recently became the first state in the nation to outlaw food scraps from being thrown into the trash. Now, businesses and households have to collect those scraps for composting.

TWILLEY: Other states quickly followed suit—my home state of California, Cynthia’s home state of Massachusetts, as well Connecticut and Rhode Island and some cities.

VOICEOVER: Don’t mess with Texas. And if you live in Austin, don’t be the Lone Star who keeps throwing out food waste. Restaurants in Austin will no longer be allowed to throw out food waste and will have to come up with other ways to get rid of extra food, so it doesn’t end up in landfills, according to city government officials.

GRABER: This all is great, but a recent study in the journal Science examined the states with food waste landfill bans, and most weren’t super effective yet. Massachusetts did the best, and that’s because of a number of things: it had the fewest exemptions and the most straightforward rules, it had some enforcement fines, and people actually checking up. These laws do have to have teeth.

EMILY BROAD LEIB: Whether it’s a tax, or a fine, or, I would also put in that category like landfill fees. So there’s just, you know, every time you throw away food in the landfill, you have to pay an additional fee.

TWILLEY: Emily Broad Leib is the director of the Food Law and Policy Clinic at Harvard Law School. And she says these kinds of incentives and regulations are important, as is actually having enough infrastructure like composting facilities.

GRABER: But still, even if that all gets worked out and composting is there to help with things like potato peels and plate waste, a lot of food waste from restaurants is actually edible. And hunger is a huge problem in America. So why not donate that food?

GUNDERS: Yeah, generally speaking, food donation is a great way to make sure that extra food gets eaten, right. And certainly better than composting it or throwing it out or any of those things.

TWILLEY: Giving away surplus food is an idea that’s as old as time. But one of the contenders for the first actual organized food recovery group in the US was formed during the Great Depression, in the 1930s. It was the Compton Veteran’s Relief Association, here in LA, and they collected unsold crops from farmers but also day-old bread from bakeries and redistributed it to those in need.

GRABER: In the 1960s and ‘70s an organization originally called Second Harvest, but now called Feeding America, was started. It was and is a network of food banks but also a recovery operation to pick up food, first from grocery stores. Then they introduced restaurant pick-up as well, and today Olive Garden is a major partner of theirs.

TWILLEY: Despite these shining examples, and a handful of others, Emily told us that, back in the 80s and early 90s, not a lot of restaurants were donating their surplus food—in part because of liability.

BROAD LEIB: In most parts of the country, if you wanted to donate food, you know, it wasn’t illegal to do it. Anyone could donate. But there was a lot of concern and, and no protection for what would happen to those restaurants or businesses if in the unlikely event that someone were to get sick. From consuming that food, they could come back up and sue you and say, you know, this food came from your restaurant or came from your business. I ate it and I eventually got sick and I want you to, you know, pay for my medical costs or, or health damage or whatnot.

GRABER: California passed a law back in 1977 to protect businesses that wanted to donate food. As long as they were keeping it as safe as they normally would in their restaurants or businesses, they couldn’t be sued.

BROAD LEIB: And, within a decade, every single state in the U. S. passed like some version of liability protection, but they were all framed kind of differently. And businesses were saying, this is really confusing. Like, I don’t really know if I’m protected here or there. Like, how do you, if you’re a national business, create a national program with all different rules?

TWILLEY: So in 1995 Congress kindly helped these poor confused businesses out.

SPEAKER OF THE HOUSE: The gentleman from Pennsylvania.

BILL GOODLING: Mr. Speaker, pursuant to the order of the House, I move that the House suspend the rules and pass the bill, H. R. 2428, a bill to encourage the donation of food and grocery products as amended.

GRABER: They named the act after their colleague Bill Emerson, who was a representative from Missouri—he had fought for the proposal but died before the vote passed and the bill became law.

GOODLING: H.R. 2428, the Bill Emerson Good Samaritan Food Donation Act, would encourage the donation of food products by freeing those who in good faith donate such products from the threat of civil and criminal liability, should such products cause harm to the recipients of their generosity.

BROAD LEIB: And in a lot of ways, it is extremely comprehensive. So it provided for both civil and criminal immunity, for the businesses that donate and for the nonprofits that collect that food and distribute it to people who are in need.

TWILLEY: There are various requirements in the bill.The food has to be donated to a nonprofit that is going to give it away. And the food still has to meet all federal requirements around safety and quality and labeling.

GRABER: So this passed in 1996. Did it change things, did it have an impact?

BROAD LEIB: I think—it’s, it’s really hard, because there isn’t great like, pre- and post-data on, on, you know, what the impact was.

TWILLEY: Emily says she has found anecdotal accounts from the time the bill was first passed saying restaurants were now more likely to donate, so it seems like it did have some positive effect.

BROAD LEIB: I think just brought a level of comfort for businesses knowing like this is not only legal, but it’s something that Congress wants us to do.

GRABER: Emily says a big part of the challenge though is that restaurants actually don’t all know about the law. She told us that as recently as five years ago, fifty percent of food businesses didn’t know they were protected.

BROAD LEIB: Part of it, I think, is a messaging issue and a communication issue that, after this passed, it was really no one’s job to be talking about it and getting the word out.

TWILLEY: One thing that’s worth pointing out is that despite all this fear and then the legislation, there has never actually been any legal case of this sort in the US—there’s never been any litigation as a result of food donation.

GRABER: Which sounds like it should be a great thing. But businesses are kind of nervous, they don’t want to be the first to test this law.

BROAD LEIB: Like, I think businesses all would like to know, like, how’s the judge actually going to use this?

TWILLEY: The other thing is that being sued and found guilty of making somebody sick is obviously bad. But being talked about online and in the media as making somebody sick is also something restaurants want to avoid.

BROAD LEIB: I think this is another really big point, and why probably this protection on its own doesn’t get us all the way there. Businesses certainly don’t want to be the first one to be sued or even, like, to be in the news because they donated something and then and then people got sick. And I, I think that’s not only a valid concern, but one that’s raised a lot.

GRABER: There are other challenges when it comes to making the whole restaurants donating food idea work. There’s the perception that maybe it’s not great food. Or if it is still good, should someone get it for free if other people have already paid for something similar?

TWILLEY: But the biggest obstacle, again, is logistical—it’s actually just getting the food from the restaurant to the people who need it, in a way that works for both sides of that equation.

BROAD LEIB: The biggest barrier that I see is more not finding an organization that’s the right fit in terms of like the foods, the types of foods they have, or the times of day that they need it to get taken. Restaurants, for example, a lot of it’s like at the end of the night, like they don’t, you know, they don’t necessarily… have a great way to store extra stuff. Like, most restaurants are really working with extremely limited space. So it’s really having an organization that’s able to get it from them at the time that they want to get rid of it.

GRABER: And this is why even after all this time of organizations like Feeding America getting food to people who need it, and even after the Good Samaritan Act, Dana told us that maybe one percent of food waste from the food service sector, like restaurants, cafeterias, convention centers—only one percent of that is donated.

TWILLEY: Which is tiny! So there’s really what we could tactfully call room for improvement here. And this is where some of those exciting new approaches we talked about at the start of the episode, this is where they come in.

GUNDERS: One of the exciting things we’re really seeing take off in the restaurant world is an app, called Too Good to Go. That is allowing restaurants to sell their product kind of at the very last minute, before they would otherwise be throwing it out.

TWILLEY: Too Good to Go is the kind of solution that couldn’t have existed until relatively recently, because it’s only in the past decade or so that there’s been an app for everything. Not to mention a smartphone to use that app on.

GRABER: Too Good To Go was founded in Denmark in 2015. A group of entrepreneurs there saw restaurant waste and also saw the issue of food insecurity, and they thought they could come up with an app, a business, that would make money and also to help solve social problems.

TWILLEY: We’d both heard of the app, but we didn’t really know how it worked. So we called Chris McAuley, he’s Too Good to Go’s vice president of operations for North America.

CHRIS MACAULAY: From our perspective, one of the longstanding points of view from the company is we have a win, win, win business model. That’s—you know, a win for consumers who are getting great food at a great price. It’s a win for, for our partners who are able to not throw food in, into the bin, but instead make it available to consumers. And then lastly it’s a win for the environment.

TWILLEY: One thing that’s central to the way the app works is that when you open it up and you look at the list of restaurants and also stores, you don’t see exactly what food is available. You just see how many quote unquote surprise bags each place has, and what they’re charging for them.

MACAULAY: If you’re purchasing a surprise bag from a pizzeria, you can reasonably assume what you, what types of foods you would get. You’re presented with the pickup window, and the price. And it’s really quite simple to make that purchase. And then you can, ideally, work the pickup into other outings that you’re doing or a part of your daily life.

GRABER: As a user you can buy your surprise bag early in the day, which might sound funny if restaurants haven’t figured out what they have left. But Chris told us that’s a great aspect of the surprise bag concept. A restaurant might generally know that they almost always have, say, a couple sandwiches left at the end of the evening, but they don’t know which ones will be the big sellers that day.

TWILLEY: So you can start the day with one or two surprise bags for sale, and if at the end of the night, you realize you’re going to end up with more stuff that hasn’t sold, hey presto, you can just add another surprise bag.

GRABER: The surprise bags are also important for the restaurant because they may have half a sandwich, and a small bit of french fries, and maybe a bit of chopped up lettuce and tomatoes that they can make a little salad out of. It really can be a kind of grab bag.

TWILLEY: The surprise element has yet another upside for the restaurant, because it makes the Too Good to Go experience clearly different from just ordering food for pickup like a regular customer.

GUNDERS: So one of the big challenges that people are worried about both in grocery and in restaurant is that offering things at a deep discount is going to cannibalize their regular sales. And so you have to find a way to get around that. Otherwise it doesn’t work for that store or restaurant. And Too Good to Go’s solution has been this mystery bag approach.

TWILLEY: What the app also means for restaurants is that they don’t have to worry about storing their three pizza slices and two mac and cheese sides, and then trying to get them to a food bank or soup kitchen.

GUNDERS: For smaller restaurants, it can be challenging to donate food because they just don’t have the quantities, that make it worthwhile for a food pantry to send somebody out to collect the food, et cetera. Oftentimes it needs to be temperature controlled.

GRABER: Too Good To Go solves some of these problems for restaurants, which is why many have joined the app. Chris told us they work with more than 170,000 partners—these are mostly restaurants, bakeries, and coffee shops, but also grocery stores. They have more than a hundred million users registered. They’re working in about 34 cities just in the US. And they’re still expanding.

TWILLEY: Not every surprise bag a restaurant puts on the app gets purchased, but Chris says that since it got started, the company has already saved restaurants from tossing more than 350 million meals’ worth of food, which does indeed sound like a lot.

GRABER: Restaurants also make a little bit of extra money, which is great, and Chris told us there are other benefits to a restaurant’s bottom line. He says someone who works at a bakery might get discouraged if they see a whole bunch of doughnuts thrown away at the end of the night. And if they’re saved and go to someone who’ll eat them, that’s a morale boost, which also has an economic benefit.

MACAULAY: We see a tremendous impact on employee engagement scores via the surveys that we’ve done. And so from a business perspective, if I think about what it takes to hire and train and maintain a healthy workforce. If I could just change my employee engagement by 10 percent, I’m literally saving myself as a small business, tens of thousands of dollars per year on the recruiting, the training, the onboarding, the offboarding of the other employee, the—what it does to my consumer experience, et cetera, et cetera.

TWILLEY: That is a hard benefit to quantify of course, but Chris says it’s significant. And there’s another, kind of surprising way that Chris said working with Too Good to Go can help a restaurant: the company ends up collecting a lot of data on what the restaurants are putting on the app and when, and they analyze that data to help restaurants see patterns.

GRABER: Like they can see that a steakhouse always is giving away their broccoli at the end of the night, so maybe they should just make less broccoli in the first place or switch out their sides.

TWILLEY: This kind of data analysis is something Dana’s really excited about, as a way to prevent food waste in the first place. It’s something that a few different companies are working on these days.

GUNDERS: One thing we’re seeing work with individual restaurants, that’s kind of up and coming, is the idea of using some of the new data capabilities that we have around machine learning to help restaurants know how much to prepare in advance, and at what times of day, and on which days. And even what should, what should be purchased and when.

GRABER: So all of this makes Too Good to Go sound pretty exciting. We wanted to try it out for ourselves, at least the consumer part, the getting really cheap mystery bags of food on their app.

TWILLEY: Okay. It is six minutes past six o’clock. And I am curious what Too Good To Go has to offer. Open it up.

GRABER: Okay, it is just after six o’clock in the evening, and I’m going to look and see if there’s anything on the Too Good To Go app that I might want to eat. Okay, I’ve opened it… recommended for me, South End Buttery pastry bag, that’s the first thing, there’s five left. South End Buttery would take me more than a half hour to get to—no way.

TWILLEY: Tell me about it. I had set my radius at six miles, which was already further than I really feel like I should have to go because there are approximately five million restaurants that are only about 10 minutes walk from me. But still all I got was six different doughnut bags and a bag of sandwiches.

GRABER: I also live in a really dense urban area surrounded by restaurants. I set my radius at five miles, which includes downtown Boston. And I got almost nothing that I could actually eat for dinner.

GRABER: Bakery, pick up tomorrow. Bakery. All of these are really far. Bagels. Also really far. It’s really mostly bakeries, and a couple of pizza places in downtown Boston. I have to say—first of all, if I put in vegetarian, which, let’s see… filter by vegetarian. It says zero, even the bakeries, nobody’s willing to put in that vegetarian is an option. So that’s a problem.

TWILLEY: This is basically also what happened to me on the other side of the country. I did get really excited at one point, I spotted some pizza, but it was for pick up the next day. And then finally I struck… well, not gold exactly. But actual food, at least: a bag of sides from California Fish Grill. But then I looked, and it was pickup at 9:30pm. Which is no doubt great for some folks but I tend to eat early in the evening and I was already ready to gnaw my own arm off.

GRABER: The one pizza place I found was both far away and, as you say Nicky, also ready to be picked up at 9:30 or 10—I have always been an early bird and I would be getting ready for bed then.

TWILLEY: So one of our shared problems was that, where were all the restaurants? We both live within a stone’s throw of dozens of great restaurants and none of them were represented on the app.

GRABER: We asked Chris about this, and he said, look, the app is still growing, and it takes a lot of legwork to sign up new restaurants.

MACAULAY: So, if I’m just going to try to get you know, a couple of Indian restaurants and a couple of other, you know, more diverse offerings—you know, a kebab place and a, you know, whatever else, is interesting. I’ve got to, I’ve got to get their contact information, I’ve got to get in touch with them. I’ve got to find the decision maker. I’ve got to like—like, there’s a whole lot of work that goes into that that the team is super focused on.

GRABER: So maybe there’ll be more options in the future. But probably the biggest challenge for both of us was that at least right now and probably for the foreseeable future, like 90 percent of what was available to Nicky in LA and to me in Boston was baked goods.

TWILLEY: So many doughnuts. Doughnuts up the wazoo. This bakery glut is a universal problem, though, not a Too Good to Go-specific issue—Emily told us food banks are routinely overwhelmed with pastries. Apparently America just has too many.

GRABER: Speaking of too many, what happens to all those doughnuts when they end up in the hands of a Too Good to Go customer? We honestly wonder: if someone gets a grab bag and ends up with a dozen doughnuts that aren’t their freshest, will they really eat them all? Or will they just throw some of them out back at home?

TWILLEY: In which case, the food is still being wasted, just somewhere else.

MACAULAY: My experience is that, you know, sometimes I pick up bags and, you know, I freeze a loaf of bread or something. But that, you know, I think that the dynamic at play is that the intentionality related to picking up the bag does, does mean that the food was consumed. Although certainly… you know, no, no calculation is going to be perfect.

TWILLEY: Chris said the company doesn’t know how much actually gets eaten in the end. They haven’t studied that. Frankly, I think that would be important to know. Not just for doughnuts—I mean, I could see a real downside of the surprise bag model being that you don’t end up liking what you get and so you throw it out.

GRABER: But at the end of the day, clearly a decent amount of food—it’s doughnuts and bagels, but it’s food—a decent amount of it is going into people’s stomachs and not to the landfill. And Dana says there’s a lot of room for apps like this to grow.

GUNDERS: I mean, there’s a huge room for growth. I think there’s room for competition. I think there’s room for, you know, some existing companies that have networks of restaurants and customers to come into this space and really institutionalize it. When we look at this approach of, these apps that are discounting food, we estimate that it could save about 370,000 tons of food.

TWILLEY: Too Good to Go certainly solves a handful of the issues that make donating food hard: the storage and pick up problem, for example, and the challenge of dealing with small amounts of random different stuff. And that does make it easier for restaurants to not toss food and for people to eat it. But they’re not the only exciting new solution to the restaurant food waste problem.

GRABER: Nicky and I headed to New York City to tag along with another organization trying to find a way to match up excess restaurant food with folks who need it – that story’s coming up, after the break.

[BREAK]

GRABER: Oh, wow. That’s a lot of bagels.

TWILLEY: Oh, look at this.

MIKE FISHER: Quite a haul.

GRABER: This summer, Nicky and I visited Chelsea Market in New York City with an organization called Rethink Food. They were there to pick up food waste, food that the local restaurants and stores and stalls couldn’t sell, but was still edible. When we were there, they filled crates with day-old bagels.

BAKER: These bagels, we’re going to make, we can make really nice bread pudding. We can make a beautiful, again, sustainable upcycled stuffing.

TWILLEY: This is Ken Baker, he’s culinary director at Rethink Food. Which is a New York City-based nonprofit that is doing something a little different when it comes to rescuing restaurant waste.

BAKER: You know, a lot of people want to donate food. A lot of people want to receive it. But there’s a logistical piece in the middle. So that’s really what makes Rethink food unique is that, you know, we own every step of that process.

GRABER: They pick up food from restaurants and also from some grocery stores, and then—and this is what’s different—they use everything they get as ingredients to create new foods that they then deliver to their community partners, like soup kitchens.

BAKER: We uniquely deliver a holistic, nutrient dense, restaurant quality hot meal. We don’t just move food product from one place to another. We are curating meals.

TWILLEY: When we joined Ken and the team at Chelsea Market, they had already picked up a bunch of stuff, more bagels from Russ & Daughters, some pastries from Whole Foods, and some veggies from the Javits Center. And then while we were at Chelsea Market, we scored a whole lot of potato chips, even more bagels, and a bunch of raw unshaped noodle dough from a restaurant called Very Fresh Noodles.

FISHER: They make their noodles out of that dough.

GRABER: So it’s the dough?

FISHER: Yeah, it’s the dough.

BAKER: Yeah. And so we have Chef Christina, or Maggie and Isabella in our catering arm. They’ll utilize this and make the noodles in house.

GRABER: All of the food was loaded into Rethink Food’s plastic crates—the food industry calls these lexans—and then wheeled outside to meet their truck.

TWILLEY: The truck stuffed full of food and Cynthia and I all made it back to Rethink’s commissary kitchen in Soho. Where we met Rethink’s founder, Matt Jozwiak, who like his colleague Ken came from a culinary background.

MATT JOZWIAK: The last job I had was with the Make It Nice group. I was at Eleven Madison Park and The Nomad for, little over two years. And, before that I was in Chicago working at a bunch of fine dining restaurants. And before that, I worked in France, and worked at Noma and a couple other spaces briefly.

GRABER: If you don’t recognize these names, these are all quite high end restaurants. And when Matt was working in these kitchens, he noticed that they were all creating a lot of waste.

JOZWIAK: We definitely tried to minimize it everywhere I worked. But It was always just like, kind of—especially in fine dining, like super fine dining, it was always just kind of par for the course. Like, if you’re going to make perfect asparagus, you’re going to have to go through a lot of asparagus. There’s a restaurant in Europe, that we had to like, peel this lettuce down, like Romaine lettuce down to like, the—most baby lettuces in the head of Romaine face each other. And if they didn’t face each other, we threw it all away. But we threw away all the Romaine leaves.

TWILLEY: Matt saw all the waste, and he wanted to do something about it. But he also saw a problem: that you sort of needed to be a chef or at least a really creative cook in order to figure out what to do with all the random bits and pieces that ended up being leftover.

GRABER: And so he came up with this idea, that he could create the connection between restaurant waste and people who need meals by having refrigerated trucks pick things up and building out a kitchen where skilled people turn those ingredients into meals that people would actually want to eat. He figured there would be a way to cover the costs once it got going.

TWILLEY: Matt had his vision, and so he set out to spread the word among his fellow chefs, to recruit them to join the movement.

JOZWIAK: Did you ever se that movie. The Big Short? Where he goes, and he’s like, a lot of people are interested in this idea, and they like, show the montage of doors slamming in his face. That was like, basically, the starting of it. And everybody was like, you’re stupid. You’re not, like, you don’t know what you’re talking about. There’s a very famous chef, David Chang, that told me to—literally told me to shut down my effing charity and get my ass back in the kitchen.

GRABER: And a surprising number of people told him it was illegal to give that food away—which of course as Emily told us, that’s never been true, it’s always been LEGAL to donate food, and businesses have been protected from being sued if they donate since 1996.

JOZWIAK: I, you know, I started carrying a copy of the Good Samaritan Act in my backpack for a long time. Because I just got so tired of like, saying it. I either had like 20 copies and I would just be like, this is it. It’s no liability. Here’s the law. You can keep this, you know, if you want. And because it’s just that question, it’s just so… exhausting. I think I’ve probably been asked that question like 5000 times, like minimum.

TWILLEY: Obstacles, obstacles. Still, Matt persisted. He fundraised and got a kitchen and refrigerated trucks. And all the while he worked on recruiting restaurant partners.

JOZWIAK: There was a lot of like, I don’t have the staff power and I don’t have this and I don’t have that. You know, they have to package everything, label everything. It has to be ready. There has to be a spot in the walk in, you know, you have to, you. Restaurants are so small in New York, you know.

TWILLEY: Still, gradually a handful of restaurants got on board, starting with Eleven Madison Park, where Matt used to work. And those partnerships have continued to grow.

JOZWIAK: Right now we have like, 14, 15 food donors. But we started going to bigger, like, corporate cafeterias. So we do a lot of corporate cafeterias. And then we do a lot of like, grocery stores too.

GRABER: And once restaurants are on board, Matt says most become fans.

JOZWIAK: Once they see it, it actually saves them money. And then they get like, an in kind donation receipt. And then they realize that—it will save you money. Like, doing it the right way. Because you’re going to, one, you’re going to start to see your excess in a chart. Like, today’s a free service. We’re going to tell you like, oh yeah, like, poundage every week that you’ve donated. So now you know you’re throwing out—you know, as an owner, you see like, Oh, I’m throwing out like X amount of stuff. And then—so you’re able to track it a little better. So, cooks learn, prep less, and stuff like that. So you end up saving money in the long term.

TWILLEY: Which you might think would be ultimately an issue for Matt, but he isn’t worried the restaurants will get so good at reducing waste that Rethink will go out of business.

JOZWIAK: Like you—we could reduce it by 90 percent and still have enough food to really, you know, feed communities in New York.

GRABER: And another benefit is that like with the restaurant partners at Too Good To Go, the people who work at Rethink’s restaurant partners also feel good about what they’re doing, and they’re less likely to quit.

JOZWIAK: Yeah, just like a lot of chefs say, it just gives them, like, a better sense of just—they’re happier. They know that they’re doing something, meaning-—they’re making great food for their guests, and then they’re also helping out the community by, you know, just doing something they know they should be doing.

TWILLEY: And Rethink’s community partners love getting a delivery of Rethink meals too, rather than just getting donations directly from restaurants, like they might have in the past.

JOZWIAK: There was a lot of relief. Because what happens is it just comes directly to them, right? And so like, a church, you know, will end up with like, you know, two trays of hamburger buns, you know, a lexan of cabbage and like, a pallet of eggs. And it’s like, okay, feed your community. Because they just get the random odds and ends. It’s why we bring stuff in. If anything, I think people felt safer because it was all time and temperature controlled, kind of audited. There was like systems behind it. And then it was all catered.

GRABER: We went into Rethink Food’s kitchen to see how these catered meals get made.

BAKER: So we got chef Amani over here working on a beautiful veg medge. It’s going to go out, to our community partner today. And so you have broccoli, cauliflower, various dark greens in there.

CHEF AMANI: All donated except for the carrots. So that’s like what? 90 percent donated.

BAKER: Yep, yep. Most of this actually came in off from our retail partner yesterday from Trader Joe’s and Whole Foods. But then the eggplant I see that’s coming from our friends at 11 Madison Park.

TWILLEY: This is kind of the key to how Rethink Food makes their food recovery model work—by rounding out the restaurant donations with donations from grocery partners. And some stuff, like the carrots in the vegetable medley, even has to be purchased.

GRABER: Ken told us about seventy percent of what Rethink uses in the kitchen is donated. and a lot of that is from grocery stores, not restaurants. And then they have to buy about 30 percent of what goes into the meals.

TWILLEY: What this all also ends up meaning is that not every meal that goes out the door is identical.

BAKER: We’re trying to have 100 percent utilization of everything coming indoors. And so we don’t just send a uniform menu. A rethink meal consists of a protein, carbohydrate and veg. It doesn’t have to be uniform. And that’s really how we lean into sustainability, utilizing everything. You may get two pans of salmon, two pans of roast chicken and meatloaf.

TWILLEY: That 100 percent utilization—that requires some serious creativity. Sometimes they have to freeze stuff for later, they’ll turn berries into compote or bread into breadcrumbs. And remember that cinnamon flavored banana cream concentrate we talked about right at the start of the episode?

BAKER: It was like these five gallon like, vats of it. And we got like a whole pallet of it in.

GRABER: I’m not sure I’d have any idea what to do with gallons and gallons of cinnamon flavored banana cream concentrate.

BAKER: And so I just had to, you know, sit down with it. You know, oftentimes you just—you’re just staring at it for a little bit. And then you’re kind of tasting and kind of think like, what am I going to do with this? But you know what I did with it? I made ketchup. This was in 2021, 2022 where like, the East Asian, like, Filipino, like Thai ketchup craze was going on and a lot of that is made with bananas. And so I just had to find the right ratio of acidity and tomato paste, and then we just made a whole bunch of banana ketchup. And we sent it out to our community partners and they loved it.

TWILLEY: That does actually sound delicious. And, big picture, the model works. Last year Rethink Food picked up 685,000 pounds of excess food from restaurants and grocery stores, and they made 356,000 meals with it to send out to their community partners.

GRABER: Emily told us Rethink isn’t the only group collecting food and making meals out of it, she mentioned volunteering at one in Boston called Food for Free, they collect food from university dining halls and package it into meals.

BROAD LEIB: So just like one other that jumped to mind is La Soup in Ohio that they’re taking all this donated food and turning it into different soups, which again, great model for like, you can—it’s so much simpler. Like they can make delicious soups with all different kinds of things and, and be able to serve a lot of people.

TWILLEY: This is what my grandmother always used to say whenever there were leftovers: makes a delicious soup!

GRABER: These examples are great, but they still only cover a small fraction of the potential that’s out there. Rethink Food has like 15 restaurant partners in a city of approximately thirty trillion restaurants—yes, that’s an exact figure—and the organization is already pretty much at capacity.

JOZWIAK: Like that’s, that’s like three or four grocery stores, a couple of corporate cafeterias, some restaurants, like—it’s just, it’s… it fills up quick.

TWILLEY: And it’s expensive: there’s labor costs, and everyone needs to be trained and food safety certified. The refrigerated trucks and kitchen space cost money. Rethink Food is very much a nonprofit, it needs donations to fund the work, which is quite different from Too Good to Go.

GRABER: To be honest, Nicky and I do think this is a great model. It’s really creative, it overcomes a lot of problems that currently exist with food donation, and it does it in a way that delivers tasty meals that are useful for the organizations that receive them. It just costs a lot, and it’s not super easy to replicate.

JOZWIAK: I want to figure out a way where the restaurants themselves can do what we do here. So instead of building more infrastructure, we use this place as like, an example for how to do it.

GRABER: It’s kind of along the lines of what Jose Andres does with his World Central Kitchen, it’s providing money to restaurants so they can help feed hungry people themselves.

TWILLEY: Matt says this model is super efficient—after all, the restaurants already have a full kitchen to cook in, and trained chefs on staff. So it’s a no-brainer that that’s great for feeding hungry people. But one thing we wondered is whether this model would be as good at using up waste. After all, part of what makes Rethink different is the way they’re able to combine different donations from different places to make a full meal.

GRABER: Matt says maybe it will work to reduce waste. He says restaurants are creative and they’ll buy just what they need to add to what might otherwise go into the trash, and then they’ll make new meals with it all. That would in theory cut down on restaurant waste—but Matt says he doesn’t have data on it.

TWILLEY: If there’s one big takeaway from our deep dive into restaurant food waste, it’s that all of this is still very much an open playing field for research and innovation. Emily says we need all the ideas we can get.

BROAD LEIB: If we think of this more as like, a system where we need—there’s food coming from a whole bunch of places, it needs to go to a whole bunch of places, and we’re going to need different solutions in the middle.

GRABER: California is the first place that’s trying to figure out what those solutions even need to solve. They are the first state to require donating still-edible food, including food from restaurants. So far it’s just for pretty large restaurants, like those with more than 250 seats, and also like venues and events—but if they have still-edible food at the end of the night or at the end of the event, it *has* to be donated.

TWILLEY: But rather than stop there, the law also tries to make sure that everything is in place to actually make that happen.

BROAD LEIB: Part of what the counties have to do is do an assessment of the food recovery infrastructure. You know, how many businesses are there in that area? What’s the infrastructure? And then there’s funding from the state to try to fill in the gaps where there’s a lack of infrastructure. So time will tell, like, you know, how well that works. But if they’re doing it in California, which is like the biggest, most populous and most complex state, then I’m confident we could be doing it elsewhere.

TWILLEY: I love Emily’s confidence, I love my state and I love how it often takes the lead on these environmental issues. But I have to say I think there’s a lot of investment still needed to make this work—the gaps are real. And they’ll be slightly different everywhere, but that missing logistical middle to get food from where it’s leftover to people who can use it in a way that works for both sides—solving that is the trick.

GRABER: Emily said it makes sense that we have to invest in solutions like these, we need to think of food waste recovery as an infrastructure problem and that requires investment.

BROAD LEIB: We’re investing all over in, in infrastructure for waste.

TWILLEY: It’s hard to break down exactly how much we currently spend as US taxpayers to send food to landfill but it adds up to billions of dollars every year. Emily’s point is, what if we invested some more of this in food recovery efforts?

BROAD LEIB: I would say things like food, food rescue and redistribution is infrastructure that we should be investing in. Where, in the same way we invest with other infrastructure.

GRABER: It won’t all be available for donation, as we’ve said, there’ll always be plate waste and potato peels and apple cores from kitchen prep—

GUNDERS: I’m not sure never producing any food scraps is a realistic goal for a restaurant. But I do think, building a whole system where those food scraps can always be recycled, and kind of a zero-landfill situation, is a possibility.

[MUSIC]

GRABER: Before we roll the credits this episode, we have a special request for you! We’re putting together a report for the foundations that help support the show, and we’d love to send them examples of how you all use Gastropod in your day-to-day lives. Have you changed anything in your life after listening to the show? Do you quote it at work? Do you use it in your classroom? If so, please send us an email at [email protected] and let us know! We really appreciate it.

TWILLEY: Thanks this episode to Dana Gunders, Matt Joswiak, Ken Baker, Chris MacAulay, and Emily Broad Leib, we have links to their organizations and reports online at gastropod dot com, and extra stories and insights from our conversations with them to share with our special supporters.

GRABER: Thanks also to everyone else at Rethink Food who shows us around that day in New York, and thanks as always to our superstar producer Claudia Geib. We’ll be back with a brand new episode in two weeks, ‘til then!