Here's some food for thought:
One-third of the world's food goes to waste every year. In the U.S.
Lately, there's been a lot of
talk about what to do about it — from auctioning
off food that's past its prime to getting restaurants to track
their waste.
Doug Rauch,
the former president of Trader Joe's, is determined to repurpose the perfectly
edible produce slightly past its sell-by date that ends up in the trash. (That
happens in part because people misinterpret the labels, according to a report
out this week from Harvard and the National Resources Defense Council.) To
tackle the problem, Rauch is opening a new market early next year in Dorchester , Mass.
The project is called the Daily
Table. Here's what he shared with NPR's Scott Simon, edited for brevity.
Simon: What gave you
the idea?
Rauch: It's the idea about how to
bring affordable nutrition to the underserved in our cities. It basically tries
to utilize this 40 percent of this food that is wasted. This is, to a large
degree, either excess, overstocked, wholesome food that's thrown out by
grocers, etc. ... at the end of the day because of the sell-by dates. Or [it's
from] growers that have product that's nutritionally sound, perfectly good, but
cosmetically blemished or not quite up for prime time. [So we] bring this food
down into a retail environment where it can become affordable nutrition.
A retail environment
is a store ... or a food truck or something like that?
Yeah, it's kind of a hybrid
between a grocery store and a restaurant, if you would, because primarily it's
going to take this food in, prep it, cook it [for] what I call speed-scratch
cooking. But the idea is to offer this at prices that compete with fast food.
Since the food is
past its sell date, is it safe to eat?
Absolutely. As a matter of fact,
if you have a product that says "sell by Sept. 1" or "Oct. 1"
and, you know, it's Oct. 2, most customers don't realize you can eat that.
Still, is it a public
relations problem to get people to buy stuff that is past due?
Well, we'll see, won't we? I
think that the issue here is really how you talk about it and how you educate.
For instance, food banks for
years have
done this. I might say, without naming the names, one of the leading, best
regarded brands in the large, national, food industry — they basically recover
the food within their stores, cook it up and put it out on their hot trays the
next day. That's the stuff that we're going to be talking about. We're talking
about taking and recovering food. Most of what we offer will be fruits and
vegetables that have a use-by date on it that'll be several days out.
Well, customers
nevertheless have to consume the food pretty quickly.
As you know, when it comes to
bread ... we all know if you put it in the refrigerator it could last for weeks
[even if it's expired]. Milk lasts for days. It all depends on the temperature
of your refrigerator, frankly.
Most people don't know that, but
you lose several days of shelf, whether it's in code or out of code. Or do you
leave the milk out on the counter while your kids are having breakfast? There's
all kinds of ways in which, if you handled it properly, you extend the life.
Is there any concern
among, let's say the people who might own a Trader Joe's or some other food
store today that, somehow, your places are going to be potentially underpricing
them?
You'd have to ask them. But most
of what we'll be selling will be fruits and vegetables, freshly prepared
product, stuff that's really not brand-driven. And [we'll be doing it] in areas
that, frankly, are underserved. There aren't Trader Joe's in the inner-cities
in America
This is about trying to tackle a
very large social challenge we have that is going to create a health care
tsunami in cost if we don't do something about it. I don't regard Daily Table
as the only solution — there are wonderful innovative ideas out there — but I
certainly think it is part of and is an innovative approach to trying to find
our way to a solution
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