How the Good Food Project is creating a zero waste kitchen in Millvale

Too much food can be a good problem to have, but it does pose challenges. Just ask the folks who run 412 Food Rescue’s Good Food Project, a kitchen in Millvale that accepts and processes food that would otherwise go to waste.

It’s all about feeding people who don’t have enough food, and it turns out that a lot of food at restaurants and grocery stores doesn’t get used or purchased.

The trick, though, is figuring out how best to use 100 pounds of zucchini or a pallet of apples that randomly shows up. The Good Food Project does just that, in addition to figuring out ways to ensure that nothing is wasted. It has successfully implemented a .003%-waste-kitchen.

The Good Food Project was started in 2019 by 412 Food Rescue, a nonprofit co-founded by Leah Lizarondo that redirects donated surplus food from businesses to partner organizations to feed the area’s hungry. Four years ago, many of the donations it took in were too big for its partners to process, and there was no kitchen facility in Pittsburgh that could handle the 10,500 pounds of food per month that would be delivered. So, the Good Food Project was created.

The food comes from restaurants, stores and distributors, the larger regional purveyors that restaurants and stores purchase food from.

“412 Food Rescue works with front-facing food businesses to collect perfectly good food that would otherwise be going to waste due to common industry practice and safety,” said Good Food Project manager Greg Austin, an experienced chef who prepares heat-and-eat meals. “We’ve grown to the capacity where we can work with the large regional distributors, and those are great groups to be working with because we’re getting the food five days earlier than we would (if it was) further down the chain.”

Among the challenges for Austin is finding the best way to use regular abundant deliveries of mismatched ingredients and turn them into healthy, flavorful meals that can be delivered to low-income households.

He points out that places like food pantries can’t easily use a bunch of fresh food or produce because they don’t necessarily have cooking equipment.

“Leah and her team decided that it would be really great if we could continue to serve those groups. So, the kitchen was born of that idea. That was the impetus. Instead of just moving the food, we were able to process food using our own facility, and hand (people) an immediately accessible thing in the form of a meal,” Austin said.

Some of the meals go to the Millvale Community Library’s “free fridge,” a public refrigerator that is stocked regularly with food for anyone experiencing need. A second product line was added made up of family-sized grocery bags.

A restaurant chef for a decade prior to taking the job with the Good Food Project two years ago, Austin said he was always disturbed by the amount of food wasted by restaurants.

“It’s always been flabbergasting to me that restaurant industry practices are so wasteful as a norm,” he said. “Think of any place where you think of abundance, a grocery store or a buffet, those things have a time limit. A buffet is even shorter than a grocery store. Fresh food at the grocery store is laid out in abundance for up to a week and they’ve got a new order at the end of the week and everything that hasn’t sold and everything that doesn’t sell on sale by the end of that week, it’s going to a land fill. People don’t like to think about that, but it’s very important that we address these things.”

Austin estimates that across the food industry, as recently as 2017, the amount of food wasted in the U.S. was about 30 to 40% of the food that was produced and put on sale. But now he and Lizarondo are working together to make the Good Food Project’s Millvale kitchen a zero waste kitchen. It may sound impossible, but Lizarondo insists it’s not and calls it an internal challenge.

“We are already rescuing surplus food,” Lizarondo said. “All of the food used in the kitchen is already a step toward zero waste and then we’re going to convert the food into meals. Now, can we challenge ourselves in our operations process to prevent all of the food that’s coming in here from going to a landfill? Or as close to that as possible? That’s how we got to the point of .003% waste.

“How do we do that? Not only do we use the food, we compost a lot of the food, the trimmings and all of that so that it’s not impacting the landfill in any form.”

The Good Food Project partnered with Leanpath, a technology company enabling foodservice operations to prevent food waste through methods such as tracking and measurement and data analytics. Through Leanpath’s technology, the Good Food Project tracks every bit of food it handles and set a goal of .05% waste. After a year of doing this, they came close to zero waste.

“As I was reading about zero waste initiatives, I found out that much of the zero waste standard is not actually zero,” Lizarondo said. “If you have 10% waste, that’s still considered zero, which mathematically does not make sense. So, for us we won’t be saying zero waste and giving ourselves 10% grace. We’re actually going to go for it. That’s why we’re proud of this kind of achievement.”

For his part, Austin said he’s grateful for the opportunity to be a part of this project.

“It’s very gratifying and all of that is related to my career prior to this role,” Austin said. “I have been the waster. I’ve been the opposite of this because of the industry practice. I’ve over-ordered out of fear and watched stuff that I wanted to sell spoil in the fridge for over 10 years. I’ve been a part of that system and it’s really nice to be able to work against that trend. It’s just been a privilege to be able to think about an alternative coming from that world.”