The USDA recognizes the impacts of food loss and food waste on food security and the environment. USDA, in concert with agency partners, is working toward the goal of reducing food loss and food waste by 50 percent by 2030.
In the latest effort in reduction activities, the Sustainable Agriculture Research and Education (SARE) program is leading a national Community Foods Project (CFP) Food Loss and Waste Training and Technical Assistance Grants Program, funded through USDA’s National Institute of Food and Agriculture (NIFA). A total of $8 million is being provided to 14 organizations across the nation.
The program supports projects that align with the National Strategy for Reducing Food Loss and Waste and Recycling Organics, released in June 2024. The program prioritizes preventing food from becoming waste, diverting edible food to people through donation or upcycling, and feeding animals.
Fourteen organizations have been awarded funding to both reduce food loss and waste, and educate a variety of audiences about their reduction techniques. These organizations are diverse in size, geographic location, and in their focus on one or more parts of the food supply chain.
In Ohio, Last Mile prevents food waste by rescuing fresh food and delivering it to organizations serving those with food insecurity. Aiming to keep 6 million pounds of food out of landfills per year, Last Mile will grow and retain more food donors, and lead regional education and awareness efforts on food waste prevention.
"We are just under four years old, and to date we've rescued a little over 10 million pounds from the Cincinnati area. The way that we do our food rescue is we use technology, primarily an app, where we power volunteers to rescue excess food that we've identified through food donors and then deliver it to our agency partners, getting it into the hands of people who need it.
Our SARE project has two different components. The first is in collaboration with our regional climate group, Green Umbrella, as well as our Hamilton County resource. We're going to work with them to do broad education through two food waste summits, where we're assembling a large group of people to talk through best practices, share knowledge, and build up a network in our region. In addition to the two big summits, we're also going to do some short form trainings, as well as potentially webinars, that can tap into some smaller groups and cover some of these same topics. As a result of these big training activities, we're going to put together all of our shared learnings into some resources that we'll share among the group of participants, but also more broadly and widely, so that this information is available to anyone who is working in food waste, or food-related industries.
The second piece of our SARE grant focuses on the training and education for our food donors. We found that one of our biggest challenges in recruiting food donors is there's a lot of misconceptions and fears around doing food donation. And when we go into a meeting with a food donor, very often they have 10 reasons why they can't do food donations, all of which we can address through conversation. But that conversation can take a really long time. Sometimes they need some additional support to walk through how this will work in their particular industry, in their particular facility.
We are developing some toolkits and will have an additional staff person who can take that time to develop educational materials and training to help dispel some of those myths and make food donation, especially weekly food donation, much easier. That's what we like to see, a really easy process for our donors. It’s possible that as we talk to them, we might only need one or two pitch meetings instead of the 10 that we go through now. That is where we're hoping to go with our grant, to really move the needle on food waste in Cincinnati."
Dig Deeper
Explore other Food Loss and Waste funded projects at: www.sare.org/resources/food-loss-and-waste/.
For more information about this grant program, contact Lisa Johnson, National SARE Food Loss and Waste Grant Manager at FLW@sare.org.