Overlooked assets

How fruit-and-vegetable processor Baldor is transforming food waste into a big business

How a major food-processing facility turned food waste into revenue.

Every week, a million pounds of produce is plucked from farms all over the country and delivered to Baldor’s 172,000-square-foot facility in the Bronx, where it is washed, chopped, and packaged before being trucked to grocery stores and restaurants. In the past, the trimmings—carrot peels, strawberry tops, onion skins, and so forth—were brought to a landfill and composting facility, amounting to 150,000 pounds of waste per week. That changed when Thomas Mcquillan, Baldor’s director of food service sales and sustainability, realized what he was throwing away. “I looked at the product and said, ‘It’s food,’ ” he recalls. “‘We need to treat it as food.’ ”

Now, after launching a major waste-reduction initiative, the company no longer trucks anything to the