Engaging With Food Recovery at Devour Culinary Classic Local First Arizona

The American food system creates a significant amount of waste and relies on significant energy, land, and freshwater inputs, accounting for a large amount of the United States GHG emissions (US EPA, 2009). Across the supply chain, a total of 40-50% of all food is not consumed. Reducing food waste is a way to decrease the impacts of the food system across the supply chain. At present, restaurants do not know of options available to them to mitigate their food waste and decrease their impact on climate change. For this project I partnered with Local First Arizona to use food recovery, or donating unused food to organizations that serve food insecure people, as an attempt to close the loop between the food that is being wasted and those who struggle to meet their caloric needs. The restaurants at Devour Culinary Classic, a weekend long food festival in Phoenix, AZ, received information about food donation and were prompted to donate at the end of the event. In total, 24 restaurants donated food, diverting 500 pounds of food, or 7% of all diverted waste, from the event’s waste stream. Donations were given to refugees recently released from ICE custody through a partnership with Arizona Jews for Justice. Following the event, recommendations on how to improve the project in future years were given to Local First Arizona in the categories of organization & logistics, marketing, communication, financial, and sustainability. A diffusion of innovation framework was used to identify the barriers faced by restaurants and analyzed how food festivals are a way to overcome those barriers.