Companywide Food Recovery Commitment
At least 80% of accounts to be Food Recovery Verified by the end of 2024
Studies estimate that if just one-fourth of all food thrown away by food service providers each year was donated, we could theoretically eliminate hunger in the United States, where 1 in 6 people are food insecure, many of them children.
Bon Appétit has long believed that wholesome, excess food should feed people, not waste bins or landfills. We follow the EPA’s Wasted Food Scale*, which recommends best practices for how to sustainably prevent and manage food waste, meaning we make sure our accounts are actively preventing waste at the source and donating leftovers to local hunger relief organizations, in that order.
At the 2015 Food Waste and Hunger Summit held in Athens, GA, we announced we were taking it a step further with a new, formal commitment to food recovery. We vowed that by 2018, 80% of our accounts would be Food Recovery Verified, meaning they are regularly (not just occasionally) donating their excess food to people in need and are certified by an independent third party. While the majority of our accounts were regularly donating food, we did not meet our verification goal. In 2024, we recommitted to meeting this goal by the end of the year. We track our progress toward this goal in the Food Standards Dashboard.
*When we first made this commitment in 2015 we followed the EPA’s Food Recovery Hierarchy, which was updated in 2023 to the Wasted Food Scale.