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GOURMET NEWS MARCH 2018 www.gourmetnews.com NEWS & NOTES 5 Food Waste Continued from PAGE 1 ReFED released in January its "Retail Food Waste Action Guide," a 44-page description of how grocers can reduce food waste through strategies for prevention, recovery and recycling, with prevention as the avenue that offers the highest returns to retailers, according to the report. Recov- ery, usually involving food donations, is a strategy that's becoming more feasible as improvements in demand fore- casting give retailers more chance to identify food that's available for donation, and recycling has significant un- tapped potential, although its economics are very sensitive to local costs for labor, disposal fees, compost values and energy prices, according to the report. Consumer education, direct-to-consumer delivery, meal kits and improved inventory management are among the strategies that retailers can use to prevent food waste. Op- portunities to improve food recovery lie in better storage, handling and transportation of food to be donated, im- provements in software to match food available for dona- tion with agencies that can use the food and more knowledge for retailers about the liability involved in do- nating food. Recycling opportunities include strategies for diverting wasted food to farmers that can use it as animal feed and centralized composting. The solutions identified by the report that have the greatest profit potential for re- tailers are all prevention strategies. These are improved in- ventory management, cold chain management, dynamic routing, enhanced demand forecasting and dynamic pric- ing and markdowns. The solutions that are easiest for re- tailers to do, sometimes because they require less capital investment, are consumer education campaigns, standard- ized donation regulation, donation matching software and reduced handling. Direct-to-customer delivery and meal kits fit into the middle of the range of solutions, both in terms of profit potential and feasibility. Many retailers are already experimenting with prevent- ing waste by giving consumers the opportunity to buy "im- perfect" produce that's still wholesome and safe to eat. Kroger, in particular, is promoting the option of buying "ugly food" through efforts to prominently display and sell slightly blemished, undersized or misshapen produce at a reduced price. Standardized date labeling, although not entirely in gro- cer's hands, is a prevention strategy that's being advanced by the Food Marketing Institute and Grocery Manufactur- ing Association trade groups. FMI and GMA have devel- oped a voluntary national standard for date label language that's due to be broadly implemented throughout the U.S. by this summer. The Consumer Goods Forum has an- nounced that its members would adopt the same language. Walmart and Sam's Club have already converted to a "Best If Used By" date label terminology for all privately branded products, and more than 92 percent of these products are currently in compliance. Glen's Garden Market is a grocery retailer with two lo- cations in Washington, D.C. that's working intensively on the problem of food waste as part of an overall goal of mak- ing progress on climate change, according to Founder Danielle Vogel. She used to be an environmental lawyer, working with Congress on climate change issues, but she gradually became discouraged and finally decided that en- trepreneurship offered her a greater opportunity for ac- tivism. She opened her first grocery store on DuPont Circle on Earth Day of 2013. "When you walk into our stores, what you see is a very beautiful grocery store – but what you're actually experiencing is a deliberate change agent," she said. "Glen's Garden Market exists to make climate change progress one bit at a time by serving good food from close by and growing relationships with partners who treat their land, their animals and their ingredients with re- spect." The markets are small format stores, competing on the experience they offer their customers rather than on selec- tion and price point, and the stores are solar powered, not through solar panels on the roof but through the purchase of renewable energy credits to offset all power consump- tion. "When you look at a grocery store, it's a room sur- rounded by refrigerators," she said. "It's an energy-intensive proposition to own a grocery store." The stores offer no paper or plastic bags at checkout, and they act as drop-off points for compost scraps in a city that doesn't offer mu- nicipal composting services. "We have people who are not buying anything, who are just stopping off to compost," Vogel said. The stores operate under a mandate to waste nothing. That means that the onsite chef has to walk through the grocery store every day to identify food that needs to be used quickly and then figure out how to turn it into food that can be presented for sale in the ready-to-eat cases. "Our chef has to repurpose absolutely everything," Vogel said. "We are engaging in what we like to refer to as the 'Glen's Chopped Challenge.' It's a ridiculous economic re- sult to buy food only to throw it away." For its first five years of its existence, Glen's Garden Mar- ket kept its environmental agenda quiet because Vogel felt that concern about climate change had been labeled in Washington as a "job killer" or a tax burden, but then, when Donald Trump won the Presidential election in 2016, the stores held a "climate change coming out party," Vogel said. "At this point, if you're not with us, you're against us," she said. "We lost a little bit of business because of it, but not a lot." As a result of its focus on climate change activism and its resultant focus on local food sourcing, Glen's Garden Market has helped to launch 80 local food businesses, of which 44 are owned by women and almost 60 are located in Washington D.C. "We grow small businesses along with our own," Vogel said. "Together, we are collaborating to displace demand for industrialized food." "In our stores, most of the inventory comes into the stores in the arms of the people who made it. They often made it today," she continued. "This means that the store is not necessarily price competitive, but when people come into the stores, they're surrounded by food that was chosen with their values in mind." For more information on food waste and its relationship to climate change, attend the Climate Collaborative's "Cli- mate Day," to be held on Wednesday, March 7 in Anaheim, California. The event is cosponsored by Natural Products Expo West and is open to any attendee with an Expo West badge. Visit www.climatecollaborative.com. GN D'Artagnan Continued from PAGE 1 D'Artagnan was to thrive towards excellence in all facets of the company, pushing farmers to very strict animal husbandry rules, slaughterhouses to process and butcher with more care, to stop bloating meats with water, con- trolling temperatures from loading docks to trucks to store … for one reason only – the quality of the product at the end," she says. Their Green Circle chickens provide a handy example – they are raised free-range and fed a diet of actual vegeta- bles, are certified-humane and air-chilled. They're also an- tibiotic free. "We were the first ones, and we're still pretty unique in that we demand that all animals be antibiotic free from birth," Daguin says. The chickens are processed in small slaughterhouses rather than in industrial-scale facilities, chilled with air rather than water and brought daily to a D'Artagnan ware- house in Georgia, Texas, Illinois or New Jersey. The air chilling reduces their weight, raising the cost per pound, but it means that there's no dilution of flavor. "We get our deliveries from the chicken slaughterhouse every night," Daguin says. "So every day, they get the one-day-old chick- ens. Nobody else can say that." From the warehouse, the chicken is put on a truck that has extra temperature controls to ensure that the chicken arrives at the market as fresh as possible, with the longest possible shelf life for the retailer. "We take this totally to the need of the retailer. They need the maximum shelf life for the products, and minimum quantities in each case," Daguin says. "These are not corn flakes that fly off the shelves." GN

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