Feds announce plan to reduce food waste, some Alaska stores are a step ahead

The meat display at Fred Meyer in southeast Anchorage. What doesn’t sell will be donated. (Photo by Anne Hillman/KSKA)
The meat display at Fred Meyer in southeast Anchorage. What doesn’t sell will be donated. (Photo by Anne Hillman/KSKA)

More than 130 billion pounds of food ends up in landfills in the United States every year. That’s 31 percent of the country’s food supply. To curb that, the federal government recently announced its first-ever food waste reduction goals. Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack says the plan is to reduce food waste by 50 percent by 2030.

Some stores in Alaska are already doing what they can to reduce their waste and feed hungry Alaskans.

Stephen Longnecker, a director for a Fred Meyer store in Anchorage, knows what’s going to sell in his grocery store and what’s not.

“In our business, Back-to-School season, overnight, with the flip of a switch you may go from selling one unit of pint-sized milk to a hundred units in a day.”

Longnecker steps into the massive dairy refrigerator and slips into back office business speak. There are sales histories, metrics and data that help him order the right amount of each product for each season. But the calculations aren’t perfect. Sometimes cranberry sauce just isn’t popular that year, or they have a couple of random items that just won’t be bought before they expire. Sometimes a pallet full of bananas is still good enough to eat but not pretty enough to sell.

“That banana’s traveled a long way by the time it gets to Alaska, and at times you will find we have some product that we’re not going to be able to sell our way out of,” Longnecker says.

Instead, it’s donated to the Food Bank of Alaska. Anchorage Fred Meyer stores donated 283,000 pounds last year. Longnecker says they started donating the perishable food instead of throwing it away about five years ago. Since then, Kroger, the company that owns Fred Meyer, has reduced their costs for disposing of waste by 70% nationwide.

“That’s pretty revolutionary for all of us because it cut the costs of expenses in a big way, and it also really benefits our communities,” Locknecker says.

In 2014, Alaska’s food industry donated nearly 4.9 million pounds of food to the food bank. Almost 30 percent of that were fruits and vegetables. That’s a big change from nine years ago when the food bank couldn’t offer individual families much in the way of fresh produce. Development Director Karla Jutzi says that’s what people want to buy to stay healthy, but they can’t afford it.

“People in need tell us they know they are buying high calorie, highly processed food that’s not very good for them, but they can buy more of that for their dollar than they can of healthy fresh food,” she explains. “So that’s why having fresh produce and other fresh food available from our food industry partners makes a huge difference for folks who can’t afford it themselves.”

Jutzi says even community gardeners are bringing in fresh produce; it’s distributed through the mobile food pantries. Jutzi says they do receive some donations that are too far gone to give to people, so they try to give as much as possible to local pig farmers.

Other stores donate directly to food pantries such as St. Francis House, giving about 25 grocery carts full of food and bread every week.

Back at Fred Meyer, Longnecker says they do have to throw away some unsafe foods. A composting system is still a few years away.

Heading past the towering shelves of goods in the storage area and back into the main store, Longnecker walks over to visit food manager and former butcher Anthony Gurule. He slices into a stack of short ribs, the massive saw screeching like an angry bird.

He starts trimming the sides of the meat. Bits of the red flesh are tossed into a pile to be ground into burgers. The rubbery white fat is set aside in a box. In the Lower 48, it’s sold to companies that render it into makeup and other goods. In Anchorage, “we will sell all of this right here to a lot of hunters in hunting season,” Gurule explains. Hunters add it to ground moose and caribou to help make sausage and burgers.

“We do our best to be as streamlined as best we can and keep waste as minimal as possible. Somebody will buy something. They’ll all buy something,” he says.

With that, he lines up the ribs on a white Styrofoam tray to be packed up and put them on the sales floor. If they don’t sell, they’ll be frozen and put aside to be donated to the food bank.

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