Restaurants and Grocery Stores Are Finally Facing the Problem of Food Waste

Shiftgig

Down in the lovely city of San Francisco, it's pretty much mandatory that the citizens compost. Seattle fines their residents if they don't. While Los Angeles does neither of these, there are still a lot of people out there who want to help reduce the 60+ million tons of food in U.S. landfills.

Kroger companies Ralphs and Food 4 Less are businesses that use the first anaerobic digester in America. "Any food that can't be donated or sold at the store comes back to this facility, and we take it through an anaerobic digester, which then turns into about 20 percent of the energy for this 49-acre campus," said Kendra Doyle, public relations director of Ralphs and Food 4 Less.

Close to 150 tons of food and packaging per day is being processed through this system, basically tossing organic in one pile, and non-organic waste for use in another. Even their onsite creamery creates dairy waste water that is being used in the system as well.

"90 percent of what goes into this system is converted into energy, and taking the 20 percent of that energy use that we were, off the grid," said Doyle.

Grocery stores are not the only ones paying attention to this. The National Restaurant Association has said that chefs place the act of reducing food waste as 9th in the top 20 food trends of 2015.

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