Abhi Ramesh had expected to return with only fresh fruit the first time he went apple-picking with his future wife in Lancaster, Pennsylvania. But he also brought home a business idea.
“There were apples all over the ground,” says Ramesh, a serial entrepreneur who had earlier founded a coding school and an e-commerce startup. “I saw just firsthand how much food goes to waste at the farm level. I was shocked at the time.”
Posted in News and Views
Tagged Abhi Ramesh, Apple-Picking, Billion dollar startup, food waste
This tiny sachet the size of a sugar packet can be placed in a crate of fruit and it makes the produce last roughly three times longer than usual. The technology, from a startup called Hazel Technologies, was created as a simple way to tackle one piece of the world’s problem with food waste. 
In the U.S. alone, each year, $218 billion is spent growing, processing, delivering, and throwing out 52 million tons of uneaten food, often because it goes bad before someone can eat it. Another 10 million tons of food never makes it off farms.
Posted in News and Views
Tagged food waste, fresh fruit, Hazel, keep fruit from going bad
Design studio PriestmanGoode recently revealed an innovative and sustainable in-flight meal tray concept that includes edible packaging. The eco-friendly design is part of the studio’s “Get Onboard” project, which addresses the impact of plastic waste, with a special focus on the aviation industry.
“Each year, an estimated 5.7 million tonnes of cabin waste is generated on passenger flights, ranging from single-use plastic to amenity kits, earphones and food waste,” says PriestmanGoode. “But nature is demanding that we change our behavior.”
A British supermarket chain has been combatting food waste in more ways than one. Waitrose, the sixth largest grocery retailer in the United Kingdom with 350 stores, began selling “ugly” produce—often discarded for their imperfectness—at a discounted price last year.
Before that, five years ago, the company also halted the practice of sending food waste to landfills. Waitrose also aims to donate as much food as possible to local charities and good causes that have passed the “best before” dates (for legal reasons, it cannot donate food that has passed the “use by” date).
Food waste isn’t a new problem. People have been grumbling about squandered produce for years. Now entrepreneurs are starting to do something about it: Recently we’ve come across several initiatives that attack the issue in new ways.
One of those is Cerplus, a marketplace for wasted food in the Bay Area. Set up by Zoe Wong in November 2015, it matches food that farmers and wholesalers can’t sell through conventional channels with buyers like restaurants and smoothie-makers. So far, about 16,000 pounds of zucchini, broccoli, strawberries, and the like, have been transacted through the system, she says.
Posted in New Business ideas
Tagged Bay area, Cerplus, food waste, startups, Unwanted Foods, Zoe Wong
In 16 years, if all goes as planned, New York City will no longer send any trash to landfills. That includes the million-plus tons of food waste the city generates every year. But, like other cities that are trying to recycle organic waste, New York faces a challenge: there aren’t yet enough places to take it.
The biggest composting facility on the East Coast was closed in 2014 because it smelled so foul, a problem compounded by the length of time it took the food to break down. Composting might work well if everyone had a backyard. But it turns out that it’s a tricky thing to scale up, especially for the amount of food thrown out in a large city.
When it comes to recycling, most people at least know how to dispose of things like plastic and aluminum. Food waste however, is another story.
It’s not that old food items can’t be used in other ways. It’s just much more difficult for recycling companies to sort through food waste when it’s usually combined with other things like paper plates and plastic spoons.
That’s where Harvest Power comes in. The company is able to turn food waste into energy. And it doesn’t need the food to be already sorted or “clean.”
Harvest Power’s anaerobic digesters can process large amounts of food waste mixed with things like oils and treated sewage.
That waste is then converted into usable energy. Currently, Harvest Power has a facility located at Walt Disney World in Florida. That facility processes the uneaten food waste at the parks and resorts and then sells it back to Disney as energy.
Dispatches From The Front 