Food Waste Prevention in the Pacific Northwest: Three Expert Perspectives
At the Collective’s January event, three local experts discussed the challenges, opportunities, and future of food waste.
Left to right: Judith Hochhauser Schneider, Emily Hovis, Naomi Logan, Leslie Mackie
The Pacific Northwest leads the nation in its efforts to prevent food waste. Anyone keen to join the endeavor—whether they be a multinational corporation or simply a home chef—should heed our region’s advancements in sustainable business, health science, and retail technology as we forge the future of food rescue.
To this end, the Global Impact Collective hosted our third event for the Seattle community featuring three panelists on the cutting edge of food waste reduction. Our Vice President of Partnership Development, Judith Hochhauser Schneider, moderated the panel discussion between these experts: Emily Hovis, an Assistant Teaching Professor at the University of Washington’s Department of Environmental & Occupational Health Sciences, former food safety regulator, and small farm owner, brought knowledge of government policy to the panel; Naomi Logan, head of product at Shelf Engine, offered insights into retail technological solutions to food waste prevention by improving inventory accuracy; and Leslie Mackie, founder and owner of beloved local establishment Macrina Bakery, provided a local business and restaurateur perspective.
After a lively social gathering in the workspace of our partner Tactile, Inc., the panel began. The panelists explored the sprawling landscape of food systems, touching on everything from government policy in food rescue to the use of smart sensors in grocery store freezers. Their discussion of health regulation, customer miseducation, and the underfunding of volunteer organizations gave insight into the true scope of the challenges of food rescue efforts in any local community. Yet despite how large each challenge loomed, the panel was optimistic about reducing food waste, citing new technologies that can be integrated into our systems, community partnerships between businesses, and the importance of data to make sure food gets to those who need it.
Challenges
Changing Business Behavior at Scale
Without incentives that encourage businesses to adopt prevention programs and robust infrastructure, progress can be slow and arduous.
Entrenched practices: Many businesses have ordering and supply procedures that, while inefficient and wasteful from a food systems perspective, are deeply ingrained or difficult to alter, and there’s little financial incentive to shift to more prevention-friendly frameworks.
Lack of rigorous transportation systems: Bringing excess food to those who need it is logistically difficult. “Most food banks are run by volunteers,” Leslie pointed out. “Getting someone who can drive to Kent [where the Macrina’s Bakery facility is based] for whatever might be needed is difficult.”
Practical considerations: Leslie explained that Macrina Bakery needs to bake excess product because it ensures that if a baked good is dropped, burned, or not up to quality standards, it can be replaced. Additionally, without advanced data analysis systems at the retail level, it’s impossible to know in advance what products customers will or won’t buy on a certain day.
Health Policy in Food Rescue
Rescuing perishables from retailers and grocers accomplishes nothing if the food is unsafe to consume by the time it reaches the individuals whom it’s meant to feed.
Mishandling of donations: “You would have a food business who is donating the food and it's like, great. That's what we want to have happen,” Emily said, recalling her days as a food safety inspector. “But then they're not actually handling it like it is food for a customer. They're leaving a pallet of refrigerated food on the loading dock because they're waiting for it to be picked up because they were told that a volunteer would come. Then the volunteer doesn’t come, and the food just sits there.”
Lower food quality: Products with the shortest shelf life, such as fresh bread, milk, and eggs, are often also the healthiest. Without safe transport for these foods, only canned and processed food will reach those in need. “We want to make sure that the food that's being donated and given to people is not just packaged garbage. We want to make sure that they're getting nutrient-dense food that's going to feed their bodies,” Emily said.
Lack of Consumer Education
Consumers have a role to play in food waste prevention, yet most do not understand how to reduce their own waste or why it’s a problem. “Recycling's not perfect, but I think most people know what recycling is and how to do it,” Emily said. “We don't really have that for food waste.”
Insufficient label regulation: “Almost all labels on packaged foods are a manufacturers’ best guess of the best quality of that food.” She encourages her students to not rely solely on the printed expiration dates when deciding whether to throw food out (within reason), instead using their senses to determine its quality. “I talk to so many people who throw out food all the time because there's a date on it.”
Expectations of abundance: Customers presuming constant and ample access to all types of produce, regardless of season, drive unsustainable farming habits and pollutive, expensive transportation.
Appearance judgments: People are hesitant to embrace “misfit” produce, leading companies to toss perfectly viable but imperfect-looking food.“Consumers need to understand that produce looks different when it comes out of the ground, and only a small subset of produce makes it to market. Some of the ugly stuff never gets harvested,” Emily said.
Opportunities
Technological Advancements
Companies like Shelf Engine are leading the charge towards integrating technology into our food systems to make them more environmentally friendly.
Improved accuracy: “Variable conditions in stores, what lot you got from the vendor, making sure that you order enough so that even with the amount of variability you’ll still have enough product on hand—all of these can be the cause of a lot of waste,” explained Naomi. In the future, she envisions computerized inventory management that uses sensors to detect spoilage, monitor freezers, and track shelf life.
AI-fueled predictive tech: “The predictions are getting so much better, and there's just no way that a human can do that as well as technology does,” Naomi said.
Increased Visibility and Funding
Washington and the broader Pacific Northwest have seen a renewed interest in food waste prevention. “We’ve had more funding within the last few years, primarily because of the COVID pandemic and big increases in food insecurity,” Emily said. “There’s a lot of research and interest in this space, and people are trying to figure out how we can do better.” As a result, we’ve seen:
Investment in hunger relief: Organizations can afford to pay volunteers and invest in more rigorous, standardized systems for transporting rescued food.
Improved food safety: With increased funding, companies can also afford larger fleets of refrigerated vehicles to maintain the all-important cold chain, ensuring that food reaches recipients in a timely and safe manner.
Education efforts:Anne Garsztka of the World Wildlife Fund mentioned the WWF’s Food Waste Warriors program, which could help reduce educational shortcomings. “We can teach kids and reach their parents through them. Once they know about waste, they’ll correct their parents and teachers. They're like, ‘Oh, no, no, no, that goes in that bin.’”
Community Partnerships
No single business can handle all the moving pieces of food rescue, which is where community comes in. Each party contributes what they can to establish a food rescue chain and create value-added products. For instance, Macrina Bakery has found new ways to reclaim unsold bread by fostering business partnerships with PCC Community Markets and FareStart, a nonprofit helping people overcome barriers to employment by training them in food service. “Macrina is picking up bread from PCC that’s shrink [loss of inventory] left over, then bringing it to our freezer. Then FareStart picks up the bread from Macrina, and they repurpose it into croutons,” Leslie explained. “From March to December of last year, we recovered about 3,500 pounds of bread.”
Filling Data Vacuums
Missing data often prevents food from reaching its destination. Emily is working on a research project with the Washington State Department of Ecology to create a food rescue map, working closely with hunger relief organizations. When completed, the rescue map will quickly and smoothly connect farms with relief services and people in need, and it will be regularly updated and maintained by the Department of Ecology.
Attendees listen to the panelists speak.
Reflections
After the panel, attendees discussed their takeaways. “In any innovation space there’s exciting energy, and we need that. It’s easy to feel bogged down, but in this space, there’s only positive energy,” said Kate Thel, community engagement coordinator at Seattle Good Business Network. “People are putting their heads together to find solutions.”
Others echoed her sentiment. “I thought my network was so developed and then I come here and realize how many folks I don’t know—who are interested in all the same things!” said Jillian Moore, whose business, Cascadia Produce, specializes in rescuing surplus food from farms and getting it to food-insecure individuals. “There are all these people outside our networks also having these conversations. It’s so exciting.”
Ideas from the event are also finding their way into schools. Vaanya Sharma, a junior at Interlake Senior High School, not only founded an environmental impact club to educate peers and younger students on food waste, but she also serves as a Lead for the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation’s Youth Ambassadors Program. Vaanya is currently collaborating with the school board to create a sustainability plan for the Bellevue School District, and she has been nominated for the 2025 EPA’s President’s Environmental Youth Award. “There’s a lot of opportunity to get younger people involved in sustainability,” she said.
Naomi Logan from Shelf Engine, one of our panelists, was surprised and inspired by the diversity of participants. “I’m impressed by how many people showed up from totally different levels of experience, ages, industries, et cetera. I hope we’ll figure out if there are ways we can build broader partnerships with these communities and harness some of their interests and ideas, making connections across the industry.”
True to our values, every leftover pizza found a home by night’s end, and no food was wasted. Every attendee left brimming with ideas that, if the intensity of the discussion was any indication, will soon take root beyond the walls of Tactile—whether that means designing new government policies, investing in consumer education programs, or simply embracing the ugly fruits neglected at the bottom of a grocery display. Change of any size brings us closer to a waste-free, well-fed future.
Big thanks again to all who attended, and to our amazing panelists who kept this discussion alive. The Global Impact Collective will be hosting our next community networking event in May, tackling another wicked issue with a fresh panel of experts. Keep an eye out for more details soon! In the meantime, follow us on LinkedIn to get involved and stay up to date.
Pacific Northwest: Leading the Nation in Food Waste Prevention
Design Swarm for Circularity: Harnessing Our Collective Genius
Carey Renn
Feb 12, 20242 min read
The Global Impact Collective kicked off GreenBiz24 with our session, “Design Swarms® for Circularity: Harnessing Our Collective Genius,” and it was a huge success!
James Bernard, co-founder of the Collective, and Judith Hochhauser Schneider, founding partner of the Collective hosted 75 participants from over 50 organizations, representing marketing, technology, finance, corporate social sustainability, and everything in between. Organizations who attended included Microsoft, Starbucks, Levi Strauss & Co., Diageo, WWF, USAID, Toro, KPMG, Aldi, and others.
Surya Vanka, Founding Advisor of the Global Impact Collective and founder of Authentic Design, led the group through his design thinking process, Design Swarms, and challenged the room to develop truly transformative ideas that will help operationalize circularity within companies. Over the course of three hours, participants brainstormed solutions to the circularity challenge that can meaningfully impact our collective approach to this complex problem (more on this in our summary blog post coming out at the end of the week).
Participants at the GreenBiz session, Design Swarms for Circularity: Harnessing Our Collective Genius
We especially want to thank our Lightning Speakers for inspiring the room to think about circularity holistically. They spoke about approaching the problem with curiosity, having a willingness to not only collaborate but to seek mutually beneficial solutions, and aligning corporate strategy and profitability with sustainability objectives.
Erin Simon, Vice President, Plastic Waste + Business at World Wildlife Fund, kicked us off with an insightful talk entitled, “Why You Should Be Like a Clownfish Today,” inspiring participants with examples of collaboration in nature such as the clownfish and sea anemone. In this demonstration of mutualism, the clownfish relies on the anemone for safe harbor and in return the clownfish provides food to the anemone. Like the clownfish and sea anemone, organizations need to tap into mutualism both internally, across departments, and externally with their suppliers, partners, and customers. She argued that businesses, governments, and communities should similarly collaborate to tackle global challenges in support of a circular economy.
Jennifer DuBuisson, Senior Director of Sustainability at Levi Strauss & Co. spoke to, “The Importance of a Questioning Mindset,” encouraging the participants to disrupt the status quo by engaging in the transformative power of asking the right questions. Jennifer advocated for a questioning mindset to uncover opportunities for innovation and improve consumer engagement in the circular economy.
Meghann Glavin, Director, Sustainability & Social Impact at Starbucks asked, “How Do You Turn a 200,000 Ton Cruise Ship?” emphasizing the importance of aligning incentives within businesses to foster sustainability. Meghann discussed how accountability and collaboration across functions can drive significant environmental progress. She highlighted the need for a cultural shift towards both optimism and realism in facing sustainability challenges and inspired the room to work smarter together.
All four speakers inspired the room to think differently during our design session and to share these learnings with their own organizations after GreenBiz. If you’d like to connect with either Judith or James to learn more about how to utilize design thinking in your organization, please reach out at info@globalimpactcollective.net.
