New York-based Baldor Specialty Foods reimagined its fresh-cut operation, completely diverting organic waste from landfill. The company’s new initiative, SparCs (“scraps” spelled backward) takes a multi-faceted approach to organic food waste, the company says, prioritizing human consumption wherever possible.
“We had to stop referring to these food products as waste,” says Thomas McQuillan, Baldor’s sustainability director, in a news release. “It’s food. Usable nutritious and delicious food. We just needed to find ways to consume it.”
SparCs was inspired by MISFIT Juicery, a Washington, D.C.-based company that recovers unsellable, blemished or “ugly” produce for cold-pressed juices. Baldor now sends food trim to MISFIT to be made into juice.
Haven’s Kitchen, a Manhattan-based café and cooking school also developed a line soups, sauces and cookies from Baldor’s SparCs.
Matter unfit for human consumption, like mango pits and cantaloupe rinds, is repurposed into animal feed, McQuillan says. Remaining materials are processed on-site into a waste-to-water system.
The company shared its thoughts on eliminating waste in a recent blog post.
The program also was featured on the Today show, in this clip: