Food service industry fighting waste
Wholesale, retail sectors account for 72% of food sent to landfills yearly
Each year, the food service industry manages to get about 400,000 tonnes of still edible food, that would otherwise end up in the garbage, on the plates of hungry Ontario residents having trouble making ends meet.
But the amount donated is still less than half of the 1.1 million tonnes of food waste annually created by the industrial, commercial, and institutional (IC&I) sector, according to the Recycling Council of Ontario, and more can be done to keep that food from being trashed.
Eight out of 10 Canadian food service operators say environmental sustainability is important to their success, according to a recent survey by Restaurants Canada, but wholesale and retail sectors together still account for up to 72 per cent of the food waste ending up in landfills every year.
For retailers, this waste can come from the fresh food and produce department, dry groceries with a shelf life and the ready-to-eat section of their stores, according to Mayank Sharma, marketing specialist at Rabba Fine Foods.
To reduce food waste, Sharma says, store managers will either use the meat for food sold at the ready-to-eat section, sell items like milk to the Mississauga Food Bank at a lower cost and donate other items at no cost.
The Mississauga Food Bank reported an18 per cent increase in use of neighbourhood food banks, meal programs and other sources of emergency food and nearly one in every 10 households in Peel struggles with food insecurity, according to the Peel Region’s strategic plan. Organizations like the Muslim Welfare Centre in Mississauga see many of those families every day. It provides food donations to up to 800 families every month, with an average of four or five people in each family, according to manager of the centre, Dastagir Bhura.
In cases where food can’t be donated — due to factors out of the stores control, such as clerical errors that result in a sup- plier delivering too much food or a dip in shopper consumption — Sharma concedes food ends up in the waste stream.
“From a store perspective, some of our stores aren’t very big so there isn’t enough to send to a local food drive or organization that might need the food,” Sharma says. This isn’t uncommon for small to mid-size businesses according to Malaz Sebai, project manager of Partners in Project Green, a program run by the Toronto and Region Conservation Authority (TRCA) that helps local businesses achieve sustainability results.
Insufficient volume of food waste, along with costs associated with recycling deters many of these businesses from successfully diverting food waste, he says.
While larger food and beverage manufacturers like Maple Leaf Foods Inc. produce the highest volume of food waste, diversion rates are much lower at the small and mid-size businesses in Peel Region, Sebai says, based on a TRCA commissioned study that looked at food waste generated primarily by manufacturers. When exact numbers from this study were requested by the Mississauga News and the Brampton Guardian to verify that claim, Sebai said it was a private study and data could not be shared.
Currently, it is not mandatory for the IC&I sector to report how much overall waste is generated, Sebai notes.
However, it is estimated that the IC&I sector is responsible for nearly 60 per cent of the 25 million tonnes of food waste generated annually in Canada and diverts only19 per cent of it, according to Jo-Anne St. Godard, executive director at the Recycling Council of Ontario (a non-profit organization involved in policy, education and project work around the issues of consumption, waste generation, reduction and diversion, and recycling). Comparatively, the residential sector has a diversion rate of more than 65 per cent largely driven from municipal programs.
President and CEO of the Ontario Restaurant Hotel and Motel Association, Tony Elenis, says food waste in landfills is an issue, but municipalities need to implement better pickup services or incentives for the industry to recycle food waste.
Currently, municipalities don’t service food waste in the IC&I sector, St. Godard explains. But the Recycling Council of Ontario’s pilot project in the Region of Durham is hoping to change that by mimicking how municipalities collect food waste in residential areas at the business sector level.
“(Food waste) is collected by private haulers contracted out building by building — you could have seven different haulers going down the same street at different times of the day, different days of the week, picking up little bit by little bit,” she says.