[00:00:00.09]
Hi. I know many of you in this room, but I don’t know everybody. So I will introduce myself and say I’m Gabrielle Tiven. I’m a senior partner at LIDD. I’ve been at the company for 10 years. And for the last four years or so, I have focused on working with nonprofit organizations. And because my background is in food and LIDD’s expertise is in food, that naturally led me to start working with food nonprofits. So first started working with the food banks and with organizations that distribute meals, like the elderly or the sick. That was a pretty direct application of LIDD’s skills. We designed buildings, we helped with network strategy, operations improvements. That work then got me and the team in I’m going to leave it open, I guess.
[00:00:47.04]
It got me and the team, into looking at food rescue, which is related to food banking, especially though it happens at the downstream side of supply chain and at grocery stores or retail outlets, food service outlets trying to rescue food. And that has more of an environmental angle. How do we keep this food from going to landfill and use it to feed people? And then we got into researching waste and all along the supply chain, where is the waste happening? These issues came together so that today, I have a team that works on these projects, and all of them are in the room. And we work on the intersection of these issues of food insecurity and hunger, and also the food loss and waste and how do they fit together. That’s the core of all of our projects these days. I want to talk about that issue and how they fit together. We’ve got two stories today that we’re going to tell. I’ve got two wonderful colleagues to help me tell these stories. Isaac Denny is manager at Lid, and we’re going to talk about a project at the beginning of the supply chain in agriculture.
[00:01:54.23]
Sean Lee is an executive at Southwest Trader’s, which is a food service company, and we’re going to talk about a project at the end of the supply chain at the food service restaurant. Before we get into the storytelling, I just want to level set. For some of you, this looks extremely basic, but I just want to make sure that I define my terms a little bit before we start. So food insecurity, what is that? We used to say hunger, I guess, but that is now we would say food insecurity. And it’s when people cannot acquire enough food that is nutritious and safe on a regular basis. So there’s a spectrum of this. You can see it’s from marginal to severely food insecure. I looked it up in the latest data from the USDA for 2023 in the United States, is that total food insecurity This spectrum is 13.5% of the population, which is up from the previous year. And a little over 5% are severely food insecure. I don’t have the numbers for Canada, and I don’t want to quote parallel numbers that are not using the exact same definitions of the terms, but usually consider Canada a little bit lower.
[00:03:05.02]
But that is the state of things today. There’s so much that can be said about this, but I just wanted to say a couple of things. Other than there’s obviously government welfare and food stamps that support people who are food insecure, but also the charitable emergency food sector. It’s very broadly, again, made up. We have national associations like Food Beating America, US, Food Banks Canada here who plays that national role. Then there are many independent food banks. In general, especially United States, food bank would tenote a fairly large organization that’s operating like a wholesaler. A food pantry would be an example of an agency which is like the customers of the food bank. You’ve other types of agencies like shelters, after-school programs, elder care centers. They are like retail or food service outlets that are directly feeding people at that individual or household level. That’s extremely brief, but a little bit about food and security. Then food loss and waste is an environmental problem we have, which this off-sided stat is that a third of the food that is produced is not consumed by humans. A third of the food that’s produced before human consumption is not consumed by humans.
[00:04:23.13]
This data is from ReFed, which is an environmental advocacy organization. I’ll talk about it a little bit later. Then Their stats for the US is also about a third is wasted. This happens all along the supply chain from agriculture through people’s homes. At every point, there is food waste. I should say that often, if you want to be precise about the terms, food loss is the beginning of the supply chain, with agriculture through manufacturing and distribution. Then food waste would be at the retail food service and home level. But the phrase food loss and waste is often just pushed together to cover it all. There’s many reasons. But you could have things are below the specs, they’re spoiled, they’re contaminated, they are not economically viable to sell them. There’s many, many reasons. It’s an environmental problem because first, if you produce food and then you don’t consume it, you’ve used a lot of energy along the way to grow it and to distribute it and package it. Then when food is not consumed and it ends up in landfill, it’s emitting carbon dioxide and methane, which are environmental problems. Because we don’t consume a lot of the food that we produce, more of the land in the world is in agricultural production than would actually be absolutely necessary.
[00:05:47.04]
Thus, we have lower biodiversity across the world. There’s always environmental problems. We now work with some clients who are environmental advocacy organizations and think tanks, and they’re interested in this from an environmental perspective. These clients, they don’t run buildings themselves, but they are interested in these issues and how supply chains can change. So we found that to be a really interesting area. So that is just some general background for the terms we’re going to use. Now, we’re going to tell some stories. So we’re going to start with a story about transforming produce for food banks, and I’m going to interview Isaac. Isaac, all right. Our first story takes place in Ontario, in the the Winsor, Essex, area, which is for the Americans across from Detroit. My first question for you is, what is the waste or loss in this story? The waste is really emanating from greenhouse production. Large manufacturing-level greenhouses. A little bit more for scale, we’re talking like tens of millions of square feet of indoor greenhouses that operate year-round that supply tomatoes, cucup peppers, strawberries. If we’re thinking just in terms of size, for those from Montreal, we’re talking all the downtown Montreal.
[00:07:09.08]
Just millions of square feet of product. This product is mostly for retailers, wholesalers, but there’s a selection of it that is below retail grade, and we’re trying to figure out ways to capture that. Then who are the people who eat this food? Yes, Great. Great, too. I guess, just a little background on that, below-grade produce. It’s completely edible. There are maybe minor imperfections. It’s full of size specifications of the retailers. But overall, it’s a great product, completely edible in the human supply chain. Right now, it is heavily concentrated in Southern Ontario being distributed through Food Bank Network to some other food banking partners in Waterloo and Toronto. Can you tell me a little bit here with this? Yeah. In a couple of different geographies, but what’s wrong with the product is it has a limited shelf life, and so that product can’t be distributed on a broader scale. Tell me about our project. Who is the client? What was their question? How did you come to lead this study? Our clients were makes Canada. Gabriele gave a brief intro to that organization is. We’ve been working with them for the last two years now. Their project was, or their goal is really to create sufficient and sustainable sources of product to be distributed to their network.
[00:08:35.10]
They were buying too much product. They were relying on donations rather than being sustainable. And so the project was with them, working with a local food hub, Little Food Bank in that area, to really figure out is setting up a dedicated operation for that second-tier product, is that feasible? Is it doable? And what are some of the challenges opportunities in that regard. So tomatoes are one of the main products. You got cucumber, peppers. What are some of the things you could do to transform that so that it could be distributed more broadly? There’s really a pretty broad range of different transformation opportunities. We can start with the low complexity activities of taking in bulk product on pallets, breaking that down into smaller portion sizes to be distributed to the consumers. It could range from that very manual process to something a little bit more automated or a little bit more specialized, such as freezing the product into portions that can be, again, distributed to consumers. And even further than that, there are a lot of value-added activities that can be done, especially with tomatoes, whether that’s soup, whether that’s sauces. And again, these are commodities that are really a staple for a lot of consumers.
[00:09:59.14]
And so you mind if you’re out of a freezing line or a canning line or a kitchen. You need equipment. I mean, do you need equipment in buildings, right? So maybe you could talk a little about what kinds of spaces would be required for that. Yeah. So if If we think of the extremely manual transformation opportunities on one side of it, this can just be a small portion, a small temperature control portion of a warehouse where the sortation takes place. You can have some conveyors, you can tables and bins. Pretty simple. Pretty simple. On the freezing side, it really takes complex equipment. You need to watch the product, you need to heal the product, cut the product, and then put it into an automated line to test the freezing. The amount of equipment in some of these higher value-added activities is very specialized and not something that a food bank especially has at their disposal. Right. So naturally, you looked at a couple of different… I mean, two main approaches, which is could the food bank run this themselves or could or should they go into the private sector? Can you talk a little bit about that?
[00:11:13.23]
What works and what doesn’t work?
[00:11:15.15]
So a lot of these manual activities, so we’re thinking the bagging, the processing, some of the freezing. This is activities that can be done at the food bank pretty easily. It could be commodities that are… The volumes are inconsistent, smaller portions. But there’s also a large portion, especially in this case study, tomatoes, grown year round that would require or would be suitable for a large manufacturer to take on. And so not necessarily having everything concentrated at the food bank, but leveraging existing infrastructure in that area to help with the transformation. Right. So it’s like the key of the strategy is what we’ve been working on is trying to find the right connection between the right match of a source of food with the transformation process and the ownership of the capital to make an economically viable solution. Do you think that this food bank, that it would be viable for them to have their own facility? I don’t know what we’re working on. I think in the end, we were supportive of their idea to put together some infrastructure. There’s a lot of product more than they can handle right now. We’re talking four to five acts of what they do right now in terms of opportunity.
[00:12:37.10]
We thought it was a good idea to put into member structure. There were also a lot of There’s a lot of things that a food bank and that team may not be able to do. A lot of the accounting, the difficult manufacturing. It’s very different from what they do right now. They need to be more staff than you staff. To be able to manage it. Great. Thank you. We’ll see what happens. Stay tuned. We’ll see if they build it. That was a very interesting idea for trying to transform agricultural loss and excess so that it could be distributed more broadly. All right. We’re going to go to our second story, and then we’ll take questions after our second story. Thank you. You got it, I guess. Switch. Switch. Sure, I got to switch. Our second story is on the other end of the supply chain, which is at the food service level. This is a story, well, that takes place in California and around the country. And it’s a project that I actually studied as part of a project that Lynn did for Refed, my mention, which is this environmental advocacy organization. And they hired us to look at a couple of different supply chain solutions interventions that might reduce food waste.
[00:14:01.20]
And one of the ones they wanted to look at was reverse logistics. And they presented to us, they said, you should talk to Starbucks, because Starbucks has an interesting project. And we dug into it. And then I was excited to learn that Sean, who was a client of Liz, his company is involved in this on the other side of the equation from Starbucks. And so I learned about it from one side. Now we’re going to hear about it from the other side. And let’s dig in. So In this story, what is the food loss or waste that’s in question? Starbucks has a lot of fresh products that they get from the lunch kitchen. I think Charles told a story today about the company called Sage. Well, there’s other companies like that, FFG and Sky Chef. They make fresh sandwiches for Starbucks that we distribute seven times a week to them. And there’s that product, and then there’s also their fresh muffins and pastries and things. So that’s the product that we’re talking about. Okay. And if you could get this out of the Starbucks and into the hands of people who are food insecure, who can use it?
[00:15:13.16]
I don’t know. Well, anybody can eat it. I guess, right? I’m saying that they- Everyone can eat it. So the product is, they pull the product when it has still a couple of days of shelf life on it. And so anyone can eat it. It’s any product that If you would go in and buy, you can get it. You get it to people in the communities around the Starbucks. What does Southwest traders have to do with this? Because it’s unusual that a food service distributor would be involved in food rescue. I’ve heard of maybe one or two other similar examples, but this is not very common. How did you get into this?
[00:15:55.02]
What used to happen? Let’s just start at the beginning of the story. What used to happen before you got involved? And how then, how did you get involved? Well, I think a couple of things happen. It used to happen. Starbucks first would partner locally. Typically, this is in very urban type of areas. There’s not food banks in the middle of nowhere. So if there’s a Starbucks, there’s no food bank.
[00:16:19.03]
So they went about it in a few different ways. They had local food banks that would come to individual stores and pick up what they could and then distribute the food to with the people that needed it. And then they had localized efforts where baristas and managers would actually go out and donate themselves to the homeless folks in need, not necessarily people that More of the people that were on the far end of that scale, not the people on the… What is it? The insecurity part for the marginal folks. Those are people that are probably getting stuff from food banks and things. So, yeah, they would go out and literally give the food away to homeless people. And so that’s the way they used to do it. Then they came to us because one of the big initiatives at Starbucks was their baristas It was like the number one thing when they did a survey with their baristas was that they were so concerned about them throwing all this food away. Oh, I apologize. The third thing is they would just dump it in the trash. And that’s where most of it went. It just went right in the trash.
[00:17:33.08]
Their baristas were like, We’re throwing all this food away. It was the number one thing that concerned them. They brought this task force together and they decided that they were going to start a food donation program. So what happened, they came to us as a distributor and we’re like, We’re not doing that. What do you mean? That was most people. I never say stuff like that, but I’m It’s non-traditional when it comes to food, and I do things that people think are crazy. I personally thought it was a great idea, and I managed the Starbucks relationship and have for the last 20 years and have helped them build their model of what it is today. So when they brought And it was like, oh, this to me, I thought it was exciting. I’m like, This is really cool. So what we do is our drivers, we service urban areas seven days a week. So we go to a Starbucks every single night in San Francisco and in the Central Valley. So it’s easy for us because our drivers are already there. Now, when the program and they, they, Starbucks puts the product in the two separate, these bags.
[00:18:42.07]
They’re like these orange bags and like muffins go in one and lunch products and sandwiches go in another. Our drivers go in, make the delivery. And that food is set in the refrigerator in the back of their house. Our drivers pick it up and it back to the yard. And then from there, we consolidated into these big totes. We have to weigh it because Starbucks, as generous as they are, they do want their taxi break.
[00:19:13.01]
So That’s how they’re paying for this program. They’re taking, getting a tax attention based on the donated food, and then that gives them the offset to then pay the food service distributors to do this with.
[00:19:26.18]
Then we weigh it, we put it in these A lunch tote, like a plastic orange nestable tote, and then we take it to seven times a week to different food banks throughout North of California. I think we currently are going to four. Then when we first started the program, we got sometimes upwards of eight pallets of product to throw away every day. And that’s even overwhelming because food banks can only give away so We’re not talking about a big… We got two in San Francisco that they’re only servicing so many folks. They were throwing away. Our drivers would come back and say, The food is in their dumpster. Why am I taking it here? So there was an awareness at the Starbucks level to, Let’s not waste. We’ve got to do a better job of planning our orders and not buying as much food or not taking as much out of the freezer because a lot of their products are frozen as well. All their breakfasts, all their breakfasts, and all their muffins are now. They used to be fresh, but now they’re frozen. So if they take it out and once it falls, it has a certain shelf length.
[00:20:44.14]
And then at the end of the day is when they donate. So that’s what we do now. And that goes on across the country. I think Starbucks is up to as much as we do, there’s still only, I think, at 30 % They’re not going to rescue. 70 % is still going in this dumpster because- They’re working on expanding this to all of their- Where the issue is, which I think is for the most food service, is the parts where they’re not rescuing are the less frequent stores. Like the stores that don’t get seven times a week because we don’t do that. We’re a very unique to true. We take all of our stores, get seven times a week. We don’t have any remote, which is called remote stores, that they only go two times a week. Well, the food goes bad. So they’re trying to figure out how to… Because even if we picked it up, it’s a couple of days old, it would be too hard to try to decipher what’s good and what’s bad. So they’re working on that part to how do we solve for areas that are not as dense.
[00:21:50.06]
With the food service distributor involved, they’re able to touch their stores much more consistently, right compared to the food rescue, relying on a food rescue group to come.
[00:22:00.20]
They might come, they might not. Yeah, I think, yeah, for sure. Because the food rescue folks, not to knock them, they’re working their tails off, but they’re not very sophisticated. It could be a volunteer. It’s a volunteer people that are just trying to help folks. And, Starbucks is unique because we’re able to service so frequent. I think the food service, because we operate normal food service business, too, like you, where you’re going once a week to the store or two times a week. Or that’s where it gets to be more difficult because the food is gone bad by the time you can get there. I wanted to point out another thing that Starbucks from the service side, I think this is easier for them. When I interviewed the person at Starbucks who worked on this project, it’s easier for the baristas. There’s one consistent instruction to everybody. Because the distributors are coming every day, they It always gets picked up, and it’s just gets better in the back of their store. That’s one of their main reasons to do this. For sure. Because I think, Oh, this guy comes this way, and he wants it done like this, and this guy comes.
[00:23:13.16]
Some days he comes, some days he doesn’t. So the consistency of us taking it, for sure. It’d be interesting to figure out how food service distributors could play a role in this, even without the seven-day-a-week delivery. And that seems like a challenge to try to overcome. I don’t know. I don’t know. I don’t know how they’re overcome it. I don’t know. I don’t know. I don’t know how they’re overcome it. You’re a mess. You’re a mess. You’re a challenge. I think me, philosophically, I think it’s going to need to come at the food bank level. Whether they get some type of grant or something to where… Because it costs Starbucks money to do this. So the brands that are out there that are throwing food away are going to be mostly quick restaurants where you can actually use that food, versus a restaurant who’s cooking it and then sliding already cooked food off with somebody’s plate. You can’t use that. I think the brands are going to need to want to get involved with it. But if a distributor could bring a program to them that says, Hey, we’re going to… We could probably do it with Starbucks, and I could say, I’m going to service my market, San Francisco, with a truck that goes to all your stores every day and picks up the stuff, and then we’re going to offer that service to other people.
[00:24:33.17]
But that’s a heavy lift to get people to say, okay, we want to do it. Right. And it’s all these balance between you guys have a lot of infrastructure relative to the charitable sector, but then who’s going to pay for it? Trying to figure out what infrastructure you can find to do this. Be cost-neutral because no one wants to pay more for their food. Yet, there might be a cultural shift and a philosophical, where you have to subsidize it. That could come from one of the eight ways ChatGPT told me how we were going to solve this, which was I typed it in while I was getting ready for our presentation while Charles was talking. I typed in, How do we solve food waste in the US? And ChatGPT gave me eight ways. One of the ways was at the end, and that was political changes, which California is a state that makes changes. They’re a pedigree. Yeah. It might come down to that you need legislation to tell the restaurants that you have to use a service like this for your excess food. But that could drive cost. Any questions? I got a question.
[00:25:51.03]
Just working in food banking, their hours of operation, they open at 9:00 because that’s when the volunteers come. Was that a problem where you guys were picking stuff bringing it back, and then you’re like, Oh, crap, the food bank’s not actually open yet? Or was that not a problem? No, Starbucks did a pretty good job of managing that. They have all these sites set up, and they find out what their hours are. We give them delivery windows, and they We are held to just as high as a standard of on time performance to those folks, if not more than the stores. If we’re late and they’re calling and we’re all… We get a year here. We have performance metrics, so we needed to make sure you have to give us certain things. When can we deliver? And then we give them delivery hours. It wasn’t a challenge. What’s the ratio of the tax rate they get to the cost of making this happen? I don’t know the answer to that. In fact, I’ve never been explaining that because if you throw the food away, you get to write it off your taxes, too. Because It’s part of the food cost, your food cost rise.
[00:27:02.23]
So I’m not sure how that works, to be honest with you. Do you and these other groups work for Second Harvest, or is this like, Starbucks, you uploaded through Second Harvest, or is this completely different than Second Harvest? No. So Second Harvest is only one of our locations in Northern California. So we have other places, but they We have a food bank, a food rescue team at Starbucks. They go out and find the interested food banks. And then, and I think Second Harvest is a partner of theirs across the country. But we have a lot of local folks, too. There’s a place called Glide in San Francisco that we work with. And then there’s a local… We deliver one time a week to them. They do local stuff and stuff. Starbucks goes out and finds these places and then sets up the arrangement and tells us You’re delivering here now. When I interviewed Starbucks on this program, they’re very proud of it. They want people to know that they’re doing it. They could not cite anybody else. It’s similar to them that’s doing something like this. So they are just taking a very active role in making that for their corporate reasons.
[00:28:18.02]
Is Starbucks not able to reduce the waste through demand planning initiatives, or is it too granular? Sean. I I think they have been able to do that. But I think there’s a… And I was talking to Isaac about this in the back. In the US, and I don’t know about it here in Canada, but here in the US, brands are I’m not going to try to not regret what I’m about to say, but I like to say things that are true. They are more interested in gaining one sale than throwing 10 It’s not just Starbucks. That’s just the way our world works. It’s like we can’t lose the sale. So have 10 croissants on the shelf at the end of the day, and if somebody comes in and wants one, we got the sale. And that’s what we do in the US. That’s a reality of it. I was saying to somebody else that I just got back from Europe, and over there, the consumer is different. You go into the coffee shop and there’s no croissants at 2:00. It’s like, there’s just none. They’re out. We don’t do things the same way here in North America.
[00:29:37.15]
The number one issue on my ChatGPT was consumer awareness and education. A lot of this demand, planning that you’re talking about is driven at the consumer level because we want our croissant. And if we don’t get it there, we’re going to go somewhere else. And they don’t want to lose us as a customer. So instead of I was saying, Okay, I’ll get that instead of that, we want our croissant when we leave. And the same we see in grocery, waste in grocery stores. We culturally, we expect you go into the grocery store. It should look bountiful.
[00:30:12.08]
Even if you’re shopping at 8:00 at night, on. That if the whole thing looks full and beautiful all the time, that that means there’s going to be more waste.
[00:30:20.18]
I’m just curious, how many people here are from Canada? How many people here eat avocados? We want avocados up here, but there’s a certain amount of waste that comes from that. It just is. It’s just the reality. Now, we can either choose not to eat them. I’m not from Canada. I’m from Southern Cal, so I get to eat them forever. But you guys can either choose not to eat them or we have to figure out a way not to waste it. Isaac’s project, it’s class two, but we, as consumers, choose not, Well, we’re not going to buy that.
[00:30:59.18]
We If you want- Or somewhere along the way, someone decided that we have specifications you must need to- Yes.
[00:31:04.16]
A lot of times it’s based on the look. To answer your question, they have been able to do that because they took it from six pallets or eight pallets down to two about what we get now. So they are recognizing it, but I think there’s always going to be that level of we don’t want to miss the sale, and it’s going to end up having product thrown away. And in the quick serve area, like with Starbucks, a lot of their stuff packaged, right? So they can be resold. Some QSRs, they over cook chicken. They can’t sell that. That’s a challenge. Actually, a follow up to that. Say that you reduce it to two. Do you see a lot of variation from the waste that you see every day from each of the locations. I think it’s pretty… We don’t have that level of detail, but I think the number of pallets and the quantity of product is pretty close. Now, I don’t think they’ve gone that far And that would be an interesting topic. I didn’t bring that up to start measuring at the store level to see if there’s somebody… That would be on their side, but I can bring it up in my next meeting to where, wait, how come this guy is throwing 10 pounds away?
[00:32:15.19]
And they’re only throwing one pound. How do we figure out that? Because I’m a proponent of, let’s not throw it away and use those resources to help the people in need that we don’t spend. But until we get there as a society, we have to figure out a way to rescue it or just say, We don’t care about it. We’re just going to let it go to the landfill. We’re somewhere in between right now. We haven’t figured that out. We want to do it until When somebody else, somebody says, Hey, it’s going to cost you an extra dollar for that sandwich. Then they’re going to go, No, we really don’t care so much. I think there’s a balance in there somewhere.
[00:32:56.06]
Any other questions, Tom? Is there any liability issues with, obviously, reusing food? Who does it fall onto? There are Good Samaritan laws that believe in both Canada and the United States that protect donors so that there isn’t a liability on donated food. I am not. There’s probably other people in this room who know more about it than I do. I think it’s like, sometimes people perceive that that’s an issue, but it’s actually not. Also, I don’t know if anyone’s ever been engaged in any legal thing because of that. It’s a little bit of a myth. That’s what I think. With Starbucks, specifically, nothing is out of code that goes to the food bank. In fact, I think there’s some legislation. In the States, they do best by date, and there’s some legislation, I think, that’s coming out that’s saying they can’t do best buy anymore. They’re going to use expiration.
[00:33:51.10]
So at food banks, they can take stuff that’s beyond the best used by date, but they can’t take stuff that’s expired, which could have been, I don’t know the history, but that could have been some of the history of, Hey, we can donate this. It’s still good. Because even canned food, it lasts for 100 years. I mean, it’ll last forever. Has there been any indication from Starbucks, specifically, that they would move beyond just the food rescue and look to all the recycles and all that, cardboard, shrink, all that stuff to run through that same channel of reverse logistics and consolidate that? Or is it individual Yes. They had us picking up milk jugs and had us looking at cardboard. They did a test with milk jugs, and it didn’t work. It You got to wash them. There’s all kinds of… The trailers just smell. It just was not a good thing. Now, I’ve been a proponent, which I don’t know if Jennifer is doing this or not, but she I’ve got an article on LinkedIn about case packs. I’m trying to push them, which my organization hates me for, because in the food service business, we don’t like to unpack boxes.
[00:35:27.05]
But in my personal opinion, if you haven’t read Jennifer’s article, it’s a great one about Caisse PAC. And I personally think that we, as the food service industry, should move towards that and embrace it, because the restaurants can’t do it at their level. All those cardboard boxes. And if we send them reusable totes. And so I’ve talked to Starbucks about doing that 15 years ago. Why do you want your baristas worrying about unpacking boxes? Let us do that at the distribution center. The cardboard won’t go in the dumpster at your place. We’ll take care of it. It’ll all get recycled. So I think they’ll go down. They are trying to go to more eachs. They have some markets where they’re doing more each level pick. I personally think they should embrace it everywhere and just do it everywhere. But they move slow sometimes. And I think in addition to the cardboard issue, there’s maybe potential to reduce food waste. If you can pick each level and send less to the store that might go bad or something. Yeah, Well, so on all of the food sandwiches, we do. We pick at each level, but we do the case pack level.
[00:36:40.02]
And again, this is something I got in trouble with my mom’s saying, but we send them cases full of muffins. And I told them, Why don’t we just unpack? Why don’t we let them order each as and we do this thing for all of the stores? Because then they won’t have to deal with any boxes, and maybe that would help. I don’t think so Because they pull out what they need for frozen or what they think they need. And then the frozen sandwiches that we send to them are already thought, so they have to use them within a certain period of time. So part of that might They’re trying to reduce the complexity on their barista. I just say send it to them frozen and let them take it out. But they haven’t developed a frozen to microwave sandwich yet. So that can be heated quick enough for the consumer that isn’t like, Hey, my food’s not here in 30 seconds. I’m mad. Again, a lot of it is consumer-driven. They don’t want to wait three minutes for the sandwich to get made. So they got to make something that’s stalled out and ready to go.
[00:37:46.21]
Any last questions before we close? None for Isaac? That’s a cool project. I have a question for Isaac. Maybe I missed it. So it was a couple of minutes late. You had the two potential recommendations, whether the food bank could actually do the processing themselves or going into Kuhlman with the manufacturing company. What was the result? Did I miss that? It’s in process. Yeah. Oh, it’s in process. I think the one, the channel tomatoes where they get product year round, it’s consistent. And lot of very large. And in very large quantities. That we’re suggesting you push to a comment factor or to existing capacity. Whereas the other products, the decovers, corn, potatoes, how you can do in the house because it’s small quantities, it’s inconsistent. It comes in at various times. And co-manufacturers don’t want to have to deal with that. That’s the two. I think it’s still a challenge to make the co-manufacturing work. It’s not as simple as. Are the tomatoes that they grow, they’re a determinant or are they indeterminate where they’re constantly producing? They’re not a determinant where they all the fruits rank at once. No. It’s all okay. It turns every six weeks.
[00:39:10.00]
Right. So in Cal, tomato processors typically only process once a year. Because all the stuff that goes into your paste is Roma tomatoes. Go to Stockton, that’s where we’re from. There’s more tomatoes on the side of the road than you know it’s doing. That’s probably a challenge for a co We’re like, Wait, you want us to start up our facility for just this little bit that just doesn’t work? There’s got to be as much money as we throw away in this world. Finding somebody who would just set up a plant that can do that. I want to sit down with the tomato panning company and figure out what we can do to make it work. Yeah, that’d be a great idea. Thank you. These were two stories of infrastructure connecting food loss and waste with people who are food insecure. I hope it was interesting. There’s so much work to be done in this field. It’s an exciting place to be. Thank you. Thank you.