The 2019 NYC Food Waste Fair featured a full-day panel program, greater than 70 exhibitors, hands-on workshops and abilties training, demos and tastings, and a Zero Food Waste Challenge. Food, beverage, and composting specialists, along with refuse haulers, gathered on May 23 for the City of New York Department of Sanitation’s (DSNY) Foundation for New York’s Strongest 2019 Food Waste Fair at the Brooklyn Navy Yard. The annual fair pursuits to connect attendees with sources to assist them reach their food waste prevention and sustainability goals. This yr featured diverse meals waste workshops and panels, more than 70 exhibitors, and culinary specialists competing to create “the ultimate 0 waste dish.”
Additionally, the 2019 honest highlighted pioneering food answer carriers, including Atlas Organics, Cambridge Crops, Farmshelf, Misfits Market, Natural Machines, and your local. In addition, exhibitors highlighted their meals waste prevention and recovery solutions, including donation offerings, stock management, waste auditing, hauling, onsite processing and digestion, compostable merchandise, animal feed solutions, meals-from-scraps merchandise, and catering, amongst others. But it turned into really the panel sessions held over the event’s path wherein attendees got firsthand insights and first-rate practices from an extensive range of enterprise specialists. Here are a number of the important thing takeaways from those panels:
A panel titled “Reducing Food Waste Along the Supply Chain” focused on mindfulness and creativity regarding food waste prevention. Panelists for this consultation had been Taylor Lanzet, director of supply and sustainability at Dig Inn; Andrew Shakman, CEO and founder of Leanpath; and Mike Wurster, head chef and culinary director of the Northeast region for Google. Lancet, who has been working for Dig Inn for the past four years, said part of the company’s mission is to use “moral food grown with care.” She introduced that Dig Inn uses kind of 8 million kilos of produce a year—20 percent of that’s a less than excellent, blemished product.
Shakman started Leanpath 15 years in the past to consciousness on food waste prevention, and at some stage in the enterprise’s infancy, he stated that many denied food waste turned into even an issue. “Over time, we noticed that food waste turned into nexus trouble that grows from above, and in case you paintings on meals waste, you tackle problems like water usage and land use.” Wurster explained that the area he serves feeds hundreds of hundreds of people a day. “So, the decisions we make every day count number,” he said. Wurster works closely with Leanpath to leverage facts to serve his place better. “We have an understanding of in which we may be extra efficient and in which we’re wasteful,” he stated, noting that Leanpath has helped with the problem of efficaciously feeding a whole lot of humans every day whilst also decreasing waste.
When it involves the term “0 waste,” Shakman said he’s a real skeptic. Instead, he offered a “waste-minimized world” concept and preserving mindfulness at the forefront in industrial and home kitchens. Wurster additionally mentioned that it is essential for cooks and generators to be thoughtful and creative with food. “Think approximately what that product looks as if in the area while the farmer sincerely choices it,” he said. “There is already a 20 percent loss inside the subject. That, to me, is the obligation of the chef. If you create and convey something to the leading edge, it has that potential to impact trade.”
Regarding some of the boundaries she has faced in the food enterprise, Lanzet said fabric packaging is a biggie. She mentioned packaging waste within the producing enterprise as “stunning”—calling out the entirety from waxed cardboard packing containers to an extra of plastics. “I simply feel that sheer quantity of volume of plastics and waxed cardboard without a doubt needs to be addressed,” she said. Thomas McQuillan, vice chairman of the corporate sustainability approach and way of life at Baldor Specialty Foods, delivered the keynote address. At Baldor, McQuillan spearheaded the SparCs (scraps backward) initiative to lessen meals waste.
“One-0.33 of the landmass in our world these days we use to develop meals,” he stated. “At the identical time, so much of that food isn’t always eaten up. So how are we able to paintings collectively to devour 100 percent of it? Whatever produce we develop, we should consume. That’s the purpose.” McQuillan introduced that inside the U.S., 21 percentage of freshwater is used to develop vegetables that move unconsumed. He additionally delivered that 21 percentage of landfill extent incorporates food that “we chose now not to eat.” Still, one in seven people in the united states of America is food insecure. “People must feed on the food product, it needs to be eaten up animals, or it has to be was power or compost,” he emphasized. “That’s the top of it. Food ought to in no way go to landfill.”
