New Orleans gets creative to reduce food waste — but is it ready for black soldier flies?

On both floors of Tulane University’s main dining hall, there’s a video monitor that displays how many pounds of food diners leave on their plates each day.

At the Ernest N. Morial Convention Center, partners from several composting organizations regularly collect bins full of carrot tops, onion skins and other kitchen scraps.

And at Acorn, a restaurant at the Louisiana Children’s Museum, chef Dale Campsen limits the number of ingredients he orders to maximize efficiency.

These New Orleans businesses, and others like them, are trying new ways to cut down on food waste and make sure their food trash stays out of landfills.

They do this to help the environment, they say, but also because it’s good for business. Wasted food costs money. And, as awareness of the problem has grown, consumers increasingly look to support companies working to make things better.

“Having a robust sustainability program sets us apart from our competitors,” said Adam Straight, chief operating officer at the Convention Center. “And the events business is a very competitive market.”

U.S. throws out a third of its food

In a report released last week, national nonprofit ReFed said that after a pandemic dip, the amount of unsold or uneaten food in the United States rebounded to 74 million tons, nearly a third of the country’s food supply. ReFed said that food is worth $382 billion, more than 1% of the country’s gross domestic product.

The largest amount of that waste, about 35 million tons, comes from uneaten groceries and restaurant leftovers, according to ReFed.

Food-producing businesses, meanwhile, create about 21 million tons of surplus food annually. But they are trying to change.

ReFed said that the country’s top 65 food producers — in the categories of food service, retail and manufacturing — all have food waste reduction targets in place. In total, more than $900 million was invested in food loss and waste solutions in the U.S. last year.

In New Orleans, hospitality enterprises and schools are leading the way, according to Dana Eness, a founding board member of the independent business alliance StayLocal, which hosted a food waste education event last year.

Aramark, Tulane’s food service provider, is testing several ideas to raise awareness about food waste in partnership with the university. Keeping track of how much uneaten food is scraped from plates is one of them.

Since the start of the fall 2024 semester, workers have bagged and weighed food waste each day so the school can keep a tally of what goes uneaten in its 6-year-old, $55 million facility, which serves about 3,500 meals a day. During one week in late February, the daily total was just under 160 pounds.

Most Tuesday evenings in one of Tulane’s two dining facilities, student workers take the food waste accounting to the next level. They help students discard their uneaten food into a clear container, which fills up quickly.

“Traditionally, you just put your tray on the dish belt, and it goes away, so no one knows how much food gets wasted,” said Emily Slazer, sustainability manager at Aramark/Tulane Hospitality. “This way, you can see how it’s accumulating.”

Tulane Hospitality also has installed signage throughout both dining halls on campus, encouraging diners to choose the right portion size to avoid waste.

“People will fill the vessel they’re given,” Slazer said. “If there’s a huge bowl by the salad bar, they’ll fill it. So we put smaller bowls by the cut fruit and things like that to nudge behaviors.”

The school has partnered with several local nonprofits and student organizations to distribute surplus food to those who need it.

Feeding the turtles

The Convention Center doesn’t cater to hungry college kids every day, but it often hosts tens of thousands of people at a time.

One weekend last month, an independent hardware distributor gathering brought roughly 20,000 people into the 1.1 million-square-foot building.

To handle the job, the facility has two kitchens, where chefs use industrial cooking equipment to make gumbo, jambalaya, po-boys and other local classics in massive quantities.

That type of volume has the potential to create a lot of surplus food and scraps, which is why the center has partnered with several food distribution and composting nonprofits to collect and put it to use.

Straight credits the food waste initiatives with helping the center earn its Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design Gold certification in 2022. It’s a rating system that measures a building’s environmental performance and sustainability. It’s also a sales tool. Straight said the Convention Center’s sustainability and food waste initiatives help it stand out as it competes with similar facilities worldwide.

“We’re the largest LEED gold-certified building in the world,” Straight said. “That’s something to be said, especially for a community like New Orleans that has struggled with recycling and sustainability in the past.”

At Acorn, the Dickie Brennan-run restaurant inside the Louisiana Children’s Museum, food waste prevention isn’t just a priority, it’s a focus of the entire operation, which also offers more vegan and healthy options than your average New Orleans eatery.

Campsen said the restaurant is careful not to over-order ingredients. He tries to use each one in multiple dishes to decrease the chance of waste. The restaurant also uses compostable serving tools.

Leftovers and scraps serve a very specific purpose.

“People like to feed the turtles in the lake next door,” he said. “Anything that we can’t use, like the very backs of the Brussels sprouts or celery leaves that are turning, we cut it up for them.”

Pineapple leather, pet food made from flies?

Representatives of Tulane, the Convention Center and Acorn all got a crash course on food waste mitigation last summer at the StayLocal food waste class led by Lucia Loposova, a University of Hong Kong professor who runs a global nonprofit.

Loposova gave a crash course on food waste basics: Use local ingredients, don’t throw away edible food and keep track of what ends up in the trash. But she also advocated for innovative ideas: making a leather substitute out of pineapple leaves, for instance, or milling oyster shells to make toothpaste for dogs.

“It has a fishy taste, but dogs love it,” she said.

In Hong Kong, university students devised a way to use old bread as a substitute for barley when making beer. The new brew gained popularity. Now, the staff at some pizza places in the area might ask customers if they plan to eat their crusts. If not, they cut them off in advance and save them to make beer.

And then there’s the black soldier flies.

Buffalo, New York-based company Stratium, following the lead of international counterparts, is creating fly “farms” to consume food waste. The insects’ excrement can be used as a fertilizer, and they themselves are a source of protein that can be used to make food for poultry, fish and pigs.

“It’s a fantastic solution,” Loposova said. “It’s efficient and scientifically proven. Save everything you have, create new things and make it as circular as possible.”

Dana Eness, of Stay Local, hopes someone will try out the idea in New Orleans.

“It’s an incredible entrepreneurial opportunity,” she said. “You can start with something the size of a storage container and scale up.”