Recipient Organization
DENVER, CITY & COUNTY OF
201 W COLFAX AVE FL 7
DENVER,CO 80202
Performing Department
Public Health & Environment
Non Technical Summary
The Denver Department of Public Health & Environment seeks opportunities to respond to key barriers and challenges to preventing, rescuing, and composting wasted food. The target audiences of Food Matters: Solutions for Food Waste Prevention are restaurants and food-permitted businesses in Denver. The project will focus on implementing strategies to increase food waste prevention and food donations in the restaurant sector.
Animal Health Component
(N/A)
Research Effort Categories
Basic
(N/A)
Applied
(N/A)
Developmental
(N/A)
Goals / Objectives
Project goals include expanding food rescue with local food rescue organizations, launching a food waste prevention challenge with restaurants, and sharing success stories and inspiration at industry events and with community members. The anticipated impact of the project aligns with the priorities of tackling the climate crisis, advancing racial equity, and promoting environmental justice. This project will address current barriers to widespread adoption of prevention, food recovery, and composting solutions by supporting key partners, providing customized recommendations, and driving awareness.
Project Methods
DDPHE will engage 15 restaurants located in Denver and across different types of food service (e.g., fast casual, fine dining) to run a 12-week food waste prevention challenge using a community based social marketing (CBSM)-focused approach.CET will create a checklist and solutions guide for the participating restaurants. The checklist will have a particular emphasis on prevention and upcycling,DDPHE will partner with WDW to pick-up surplus food donations from the participating restaurants and businesses utilizing their volunteer food recovery platform.To create awareness and promote waste diversion practices, DDPHE will organize 1 close-out event for the restaurant challenge. During the close-out event, participating restaurants will cook dishes using food that would typically go to waste, allowing community members to sample them.The restaurant challenge's success will be measured via pre- and post-challenge surveys, as well as the number and types of food waste prevention solutions implemented. Our vision of success would be that 15 restaurants collectively take 30 new actions to prevent food waste in their operations, and ten restaurants participate in the restaurant cook-out close out event, which will see these businesses cooking meals with food that would have otherwise been wasted.DDPHE plans on surveying the restaurants immediately after the conclusion of the challenge, and also several months later, to see if reported changes in operations continue to be implemented. Participating restaurants will also collectively donate 5,000 pounds of rescued food over the course of the 12 weeks. WDW reports and measures success quantitatively in the amounts and types of food recovered and distributed each year, monitoring and evaluating this data on a daily basis. WDW utilizes an inventory system that tracks the specific type of food and servings of all donations received and distributed and uses this data to identify areas of opportunity and address immediate needs that arise. Additionally, WDW utilizes Domo, a cloud-based software program that allows extensive evaluation and analytics to help monitor impact and effectiveness. Domo is also used to measure the environmental impact of donated food, calculating in real-time the amount of greenhouse gases diverted and water saved.This project has exponential opportunities for replication. Findings from the challenge will be documented and shared with local governments across the country. Our strategy to reduce food waste is addressing a national and regional problem. The challenge is how to scale food recovery efforts while encouraging businesses to adopt prevention, donation, and composting measures. Our project will navigate these barriers and serve as a replicable model for others.