Blog posts from:
Rose Benjamin

We're proud to introduce our new Internal Food Recovery Guide, a practical resource created to help our general managers and chefs nationwide launch and sustain impactful food recovery programs.

With approximately 38% of food in our supply chain going to waste — costing roughly $218 billion each year — the need for food waste reduction is overwhelming from an equity, economic, and environmental perspective. While these numbers are shocking, it’s easy to get lost in the national statistics and fail to see the immense amount of community-driven change happening all around us. At ReFED's annual conference, the focus was sharing strategies on food waste reduction across local and federal levels and between public and private sectors.

We’re no strangers to fighting food waste at Bon Appétit – we've been finding ways to keep food out of landfills since we opened our doors. Our most exciting step toward fighting food waste in our kitchens was the creation of Waste Not™ in 2021, our proprietary waste tracking system created by chefs, for chefs. Now we are excited to introduce our newly upgraded companywide waste commitments, which will help us meet our broader goal of reducing food loss and waste nationally by 50% by 2030, which we first pledged to work toward in 2016.  

At Bon Appétit Management Company, we've been looking at food loss and food waste prevention as critical levers in combatting the climate crisis since 2007. So we were pleased to see the Biden-Harris Draft National Strategy for Reducing Food Loss and Waste and Recycling Organics, as recently published in a joint effort via the USDA, EPA, and FDA and released at COP28 in December.  

At Bon Appétit Management Company, food waste is our foe. The 40% of food that goes unsold or uneaten in the United States is a major contributor to greenhouse gas emissions, but it’s more than that.