With sustainability at front of mind, New Seasons Market and its 19 locations started implementing wasted food tracking and diversion strategies in 2021. Since then, efforts have grown from simply tracking wasted food, to implementing strategies to reduce waste, including repurposing rotisserie chicken and piloting upcycling programs for ground beef and berries.
The catalyst for this project started when New Seasons Market signed on to the Pacific Coast Food Waste Commitment supported by the World Wildlife Fund. The grocer began carefully tracking the quantity and contents of its wasted food products. The prepared foods department, where there was the largest excess of waste, is where the market initially launched its efforts. Standardized Universal Product Codes were created to accurately scan all wasted items to designated waste codes, and new codes for previously untracked items were created.
“New Seasons Market’s creativity in exploring upcycling opportunities is an inspiration for all in the retail sector,” noted Tara McNerney, the Pacific Coast Food Waste Commitment Manager for Food Loss and Waste for the World Wildlife Fund. “Businesses stand to gain so much from upcycled products and the resulting recoup of profits.”
New Seasons Market was able to create customized weekly summary reports on each location’s waste. The grocer also invested in a tool that allows locations to estimate their inventory and waste in four-hour intervals. The tracking system allowed the market to improve its ordering accuracy, prevent more wasted food, use the data to understand trends in surplus food, discover hotspots for wasted food, and find new avenues for reducing wasted food, such as upcycling.
The most impactful solution that came out of New Seasons Market’s wasted food tracking was to upcycle rotisserie chicken. Rather than composting rotisserie chickens that were not sold within a few hours, the grocer worked with packaging suppliers to purchase containers that could sustain the chicken at a consistent and safe temperature for hours at a time. Once it implemented this packaging change, New Seasons Market was able to display rotisserie chickens for up to three hours and then upcycle the unsold units into pulled chicken.
The results of this practice were impactful not just to the waste stream, but to New Seasons Market’s bottom line. From January to October 2022, this strategy upcycled 15,000 rotisserie chicken units (equivalent to 20,000 pounds), avoided more than 23.4 metric tons of CO2 emissions (or 58,000 driven miles), saved 9.4 million gallons of water, and increased sales of hot rotisserie chickens by 25%.
Seeing the multi-level success of this wasted food reduction practice, New Seasons Market was eager to find other ways to reduce waste. Through the Pacific Coast Food Waste Commitment, New Seasons Market partnered with the Center for EcoTechnology, a non-profit that offers wasted food support to businesses, to brainstorm ideas for upcycling surplus berries and ground beef. Berries from the produce section will be repurposed into salad bar additions and ground beef, which New Seasons Market grinds in-house, will be repurposed for taco meat.
New Seasons Market and the Center for EcoTechnology identified key considerations for focusing its efforts on berries and ground beef, including offering new value to customers while requiring minimal extra work from staff, taco meat upcycled from ground beef offers a high potential for sales and waste reduction, and upcycled ground beef allows staff flexibility as it can be added to the prepared foods department’s hot bar or individually packaged for the grab-and-go section. New Seasons Market is projected to save nearly $1,000 per quarter across all stores through these waste reduction strategies.
“The strategies employed by New Seasons Market have the potential to dramatically change the retail food sector not only by saving money and reducing food waste but by generating new income streams.” said Center for EcoTechnology Chief Growth Officer Lorenzo Macaluso. “We look forward to working with other businesses to implement this successful model.”
Beef production is one of the largest contributors to greenhouse gas emissions amongst produce, baked goods, and other items. With one pound of beef requiring nearly 1,800 gallons of water to produce, New Seasons Market saves around 5.2 million gallons of water a year through its upcycling efforts and avoids generating 40.62 metric tons of CO2 emissions annually.
Looking forward, New Seasons Market aims to expand its upcycling efforts into other departments, such as repurposing surplus bread into bread pudding in its bakeries. Learn more about its waste reduction work with the Pacific Coast Food Waste Commitment and the Center for EcoTechnology, and with support from the World Wildlife Fund.