Giving Compass' Take:
- Sara Sherburne reports on Menus of Change University Research Collaborative and ReFED's efforts to repurpose food waste from university dining halls.
- How can you support efforts in your community to repurpose food waste and ensure that everyone has equitable access to nutritious food?
- Learn more about key issues in food and nutrition and how you can help.
- Search our Guide to Good for nonprofits focused on food equity in your area.
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The Menus of Change University Research Collaborative (MCURC), in collaboration with ReFED, is helping foodservice operators and dining halls repurpose food and reduce food waste while supporting their triple bottom line.
MCURC is a global collaboration of more than 80 colleges and universities, foodservice companies, and research collaborators advancing plant-forward diets and reducing food waste in campus dining. During a 12-week research sprint, MCURC chefs at 9 university dining halls developed and implemented recipes with repurposed ingredients. MCURC teamed up with ReFED, a food waste nonprofit in the United States, to track and analyze the data.
Sara Burnett, Executive Director of ReFED, tells Food Tank that when it comes to dining halls repurposing food and reducing food waste, prevention should always come first. But, she says, “We can’t prevent all the waste. We’re not able to predict exactly how much to produce all the time. Repurposing is the next step on that journey…It is a way to get through all that volatility that naturally happens in foodservice.”
According to ReFED, the U.S. generated 73.9 million tons of surplus food in 2023. The foodservice sector produced 17.2 percent of that—about 13 million tons.
The MCURC chefs were tasked with designing and implementing one or two repurposed recipes. Over the course of the research sprint, they tracked metrics including cost and pre-consumer food waste.
“Our goal was really to look at how chefs’ creativity could be utilized as a food waste solution,” Abby Fammartino, Co-Director of MCURC, tells Food Tank. “We wanted to know, how does repurposing as a food waste solution impact an operation, quantitatively and qualitatively?”
“When we started a lot of this [research], the concern, or the hesitancy within leadership in our division was, is that going to be possible? That sounds like a lot,” Brian Cochrane, Head Chef at Vanderbilt University and a participant in the research sprint tells Food Tank.
Read the full article about food waste in university dining halls by Sara Sherburne at Food Tank.