Food Recycling
The USDA estimates that each year, America wastes 20 percent of its food supply. The produce and protein we send to landfills and compost heaps could feed 49 million Americans annually.
DC Central Kitchen has been recovering leftover food and converting it into meals for our hungry and at-risk neighbors for more than two decades. We now recycle more than three tons of surplus products from major food service corporations each day.
In 2009, DC Central Kitchen recovered 762,930 pounds of food, and distributed approximately 1.75 million meals to its partner agencies in the DC metropolitan area.
Though donated food has long been essential to our operations, our biggest single expense is purchasing supplementary ingredients that turn donations into balanced meals.
To address this, DC Central Kitchen started what we call the Farm to Kitchen initiative. We buy discounted produce from local farmers, truck them to our central location in DC, and process them for use in meal production.
To date, we have procured hundreds of thousands of pounds of produce from local farms, much of which, due to blemishes or odd shaping, would have otherwise gone to waste.
While our produce costs are down, we are offering growers higher prices than they receive from large processing companies and saving them money on packaging and distribution.
Praising the program, Toigo Orchards and Farms owner Mark Toigo told the Washington Post that “As a farm operator, I want to see a greater return. This earns us more money and it costs [the kitchen] less…That’s better business.”
Our fresh approach to recycling food is helping us to become more sustainable—fiscally and environmentally.
Our partnerships are essential to the Food Recycling program’s success. To name just a few, we recover leftover lunch food from private grade schools, surplus barbecue from Smokey Glen Farm, extra crops from the Mid-Atlantic Gleaning Network, and excess fresh produce from FRESHFARM Markets.
