While when we meet, we change the world, as the MPI slogan so aptly states, all that meeting can result in a lot of food being wasted.
The USDA and other sources have estimated that the U.S. wastes approximately 40% of its food annually, and as any veteran meeting and event planner knows, that could be low-balling our industry’s contribution.
[On-Demand Webinar: Food Waste: How You Can Help Lessen One of Our Industry’s Most Vexing Issues]
The industry is cognizant of this shortcoming, with many convention centers and hotels offering programs that harvest leftover food. One company helping major facilities and events send their leftovers to hungry humans instead of landfills is Vesta Foodservice, a major food service distributor just celebrating its 40th anniversary and with operations in Los Angeles, San Francisco, Las Vegas and Phoenix, via its Chefs to End Hunger food recovery nonprofit.
San Francisco Marriott Marquis and Wolfgang Puck Catering are two major hospitality industry clients who participates in the program, which was founded in 2012.
“I think that it's really important for [facilities] to have a plan for diverting any prepared food from going into the landfills and instead being diverted to the highest value in food recovery, which is repurposing it to feed food-insecure populations,” said Jin Ju Wilder, vice president of marketing and business development for Vesta. “Using it as food is the highest value. People talk about composting and they talk about using it to make animal food, but the highest value is using it to feed food-insecure populations, so this allows you to do that.”
[Related: How the Events Industry Can Reduce Food Waste]
How Chefs to End Hunger’s Kits Work
Vesta, through its Chefs to End Hunger nonprofit 501(c)(3), provides free kits comprised of cardboard boxes, aluminum food pans, plastic bags and bar-coded tracking labels to its foodservice partners, along with pick-up services for all donated food items to be delivered back to Vesta’s facilities. Since Vesta’s food delivery trucks already serve the meeting and event facilities, making a return trip back to the processing facility with the donated food is a logical corporate social responsibility (CSR) practice.
"Each one of these kits has a unique barcode assigned to it," Wilder explained. "We scan it when a customer orders it so we know how many of these empty kits are sent out, and then when it's returned to our facility, we scan it back in. This allows us to track exactly which customers donated which kits and allows us to keep track of their overall food donations."
According to Vesta’s Chefs to End Hunger webpage, the food donation effort harvested the following amounts in 2024:
- Kits donated: 26,752
- Pounds of food donated: 775,808
- Meals donated: 646,507
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