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been playing around with radishes,” he adds. In the summer, however, “you’ll see organ- ized chaos. The fields will be full,” says Kennedy. “Year round, we’re at about four full-time employees, but then in the summer we pick up anywhere from six to maybe ten. It sounds small, and it is, but we’re trying to become automated because we know if we want to understand the real life of a farmer, they want to be automated. They just can’t
get the workforce.”
“The relationship we have with our
organic farm and local sourcing, and its connection to the stores and our restaurant, Next Door, in Pittsford, NY, folds beautifully into Wegmans sustainability approach for our employees and customers,” says Jason Wadsworth, sustainability coordinator. “It’s an arm of research and development and a way we can pilot and try new things.”
Wegmans’ restaurant, Next Door, nurtures an integral relationship with its organic farm, where in the spring and summer time, the restaurant will actually build menus around the seasonal varieties, with constant deliveries.
“Last year, we devoted a plot just for the restaurant,” says Kennedy. “The staff comes down and helps harvest. The chefs will give us a list of items they want us to test for them. We do a lot of trialing of different herbs, for instance. The restaurant chefs always are coming up with a new idea or variety and we don’t know how it grows in this area. We’ll try it on a small scale. Then if it works well for the restaurant, we can put it in bigger production,” Kennedy says, but emphasizes, “The big plots we save for the things that we know are working well for us and that sell well.” pb
taking tonnage out of our compactors and it’s free food for their animals, so it’s a win/win, and we’ve been very successful with that program. Other than that, it’s composting, which is not always possible,” he says, noting, “In Rochester and Buffalo, there’s a lack of infrastructure to do that.”
Composting makes sense when there are facilities within a reasonable distance, which for Wegmans generally means a 50-mile radius. “If we go further than 50 miles, tracking compostable produce waste, then the economics sort of fall out,” says Wadsworth. “So it’s always a give-and-take there. It’s the right thing to do, but how much can you afford to do the right thing?”
It’s hard to justify paying two times more to compost than to throw away in a landfill. When you try to tell the store manager, ‘Well, this is the right thing to do, but it’s going to cost you twice as much,’ it’s a hard sell,” says Wadswor th.
Wegmans also has a six-store pilot in Rochester with a unique company that makes ethanol from foods, according to Wadsworth
Without divulging any financials, Wegmans receives a rebate on its plastic and cardboard recycling. Unfortunately, today there is not a rebate structure on food waste, Wadswor th explains, and that’s just an economic model that needs to be developed.
Wegmans is a member of the Food Waste Reduction Alliance, a collaborative effort from FMI/GMA, the National Restaurant Associa- tion and Feeding America. The goal is to donate more to people than animals. “In the last five years, we’ve gone from less than a third of our stores doing something in that area to around one-half to two-thirds,” according to Wadsworth.
“We’re doing pilots in our Buffalo stores to increase our food donations of protein to food banks, and hopefully we can expand the program to all our stores eventually,” says Dunn. “We get tons of bread and how much can the food banks use? They need the meat, they need the protein, but we’re also trying to find outlets for any food scraps,” says Dunn.
There’s the whole hierarchy that retailers go through of what to do with good, edible food, Wadsworth explains. “The produce may have a blemish and we’ll set that aside in a back room. I’m not saying every single store does this, but the majority of them do. Our chefs will shop that produce first, rather than going to the sales floor and picking the best thing because they don’t need it to look good. They just cut the blemish out and use it,” he continues. “I couldn’t call out specifically how
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