The Wasatch Back has a reputation for having some of the best places to eat in the state. Soon, those eateries may gain a reputation for sustainability, too.
The Park City Community Foundation last year launched a Zero Food Waste initiative that seeks to reduce food waste in the county, ideally to zero net waste. That program began with a largely residential program through Salt Lake-based Momentum Recycling that provides a curbside food waste collection service to Summit County residents, as well as businesses.
Now, the foundation is expanding that initiative to also focus on consumer-facing businesses who work with food, like restaurants, catering companies, resorts and hotels.
At a June 3 workshop, representatives from those businesses met and began the long-haul process of answering, and then following through on, a difficult question: What will it take to reduce their food waste to a complete zero?
That’s going to be a different equation for each business, of course. The practices that help, say, Este Pizza aren’t going to be the same for Deer Valley Resort, and, for instance, a catering company in Kamas has to consider training wedding season hires to think about food waste, whereas French brasserie Le Depot is more concerned with having a convenient place on Main Street to even store its compost.
ReFED, a national nonprofit leading in food waste solutions, helped facilitate the workshop and started the day off with some facts: In 2023, the U.S. generated 73.9 million tons of surplus food — that which goes unsold, unused or uneaten — or 31% of the country’s food supply and a $382 billion value. Utah that same year generated 123,000 tons, according to ReFED.
The good news about food waste is that people care. There’s a growing sense, nationally, that it’s an issue worth solving. Food waste ranks third among U.S. consumers’ top food concerns, and 72% of consumers are more conscious about food waste than they were before the pandemic. Three in four adults said they would opt for a smaller portion at a smaller price, according to the National Restaurant Association’s State of the Industry Report 2024.
Plus, the fact that these businesses were there in the room itself showed a level of care and commitment. The landfill is, well, filling up. Let’s do something about it.
Restaurateurs just have to figure out how to get there. The workshop participants took a field trip to Este Pizza, where co-owners Carissa and Josh Devenport showed what has worked for their business to mitigate waste.
Staff at Este are trained to dump food waste in a specific green bin in the kitchen. Then, every night, they dump that in a larger bin outside. Once a week, Momentum Recycling comes and takes it to an anaerobic digester in Salt Lake — facilities that treat organic materials like food, manure and sewage sludge to create useful products, like biogas or fertilizer.
The outside bin is in a small, sectioned-off area where the pizzeria’s other waste is stored, too. Carissa said they don’t have a problem with flies or anything because Momentum picks up frequently enough. If Este needs a sooner pickup, they’ll come and do it then, too.
Another key is that Josh has become attuned to how much food they actually need to operate. Cutting back or even purchasing wholesale food as needed rather than ordering overly large quantities from U.S. Foods. It doesn’t make sense to order a bunch of greens in April, for instance, right as sales start to wane in the shoulder season.
“We can just pick up a box of salad mix if we need it if we get low,” Carissa said, “which really helps with our waste in general, just to make sure that we’re not getting too much product to begin with.”
Being a pizza place, Este can also more easily communicate quantities to customers by showing the diameter of their pies. If you’re just eating for yourself, get a 14-inch pizza; if you’re getting an 18 inch, plan to take leftovers home. Don’t buy too much if you’re just going to toss it, they ask, recognizing that this could at times cut into sales.
Este Pizza has saved about 10,000 pounds a year of waste since starting to compost food waste three years ago, according to Momentum.
“We’re really blessed to have a lot of space in order to do food waste composting,” Carissa said. “We don’t struggle with some of the issues that, like Main Street businesses, for example, do with space.”
The visit prompted other businesses to discuss their own challenges. For Deer Valley Resort, one issue is that food waste is just a portion of their overall waste, a slice of the pie. It’s more difficult for businesses at their scale to separate food waste from everything else.
Victoria Schlaepfer, sustainability manager for Deer Valley, said one solution could be that they focus on bringing more local eateries like Deer Valley Cafe up to speed first, then find ways to scale those zero-waste practices out to other divisions where that may be more challenging, such as mountain operations, where a lot of their waste stream is metals and rubbers. At Deer Valley’s scale, there’s a lot to learn from smaller businesses, she said.
“I think one of my favorite things about this (initiative) is that it’s bringing together businesses of all sizes in the community, and being able to talk to each other and figure out solutions based on what’s working at a very local level,” Schlaepfer said.
Other businesses also said that the separation process can be daunting. Even though they’ve put resources into things like compostable cutlery, for example, those things can’t necessarily mix with food waste, so although they may be trying to be compost conscious in different areas, their efforts may not comport.
For Jason Greenberg, owner of Nosh, which offers Mediterranean and Middle Eastern food out of Bonanza Park, the workshop was a good opportunity to dig into the challenges of reducing food waste.
“It’s been a lot of good information. I think the program is heading in the right direction,” Greenberg said. “I would say my biggest concern is really the education and how to get what we’re learning here to the minds of our servers and back-of-house staff — and then showing that impact to the customers and bring them some knowledge as well.”
He added that part of the challenge is getting everyone in an organization on board, building a business case for the money minded. Sometimes it’s about demonstrating that reducing food waste is ultimately not just an eco-friendly, moral imperative, but potentially also good for a business’s bottom line, too.
For Clayton Price, director of event operations at Culinary Crafts, a full-service catering company with a venue on Main Street, a big hurdle is bringing seasonal staff on board. In June, for wedding season, that can mean a lot of new people to inculcate the value of reducing food waste.
Similarly, for Kamas-based Done To Your Taste Catering & Events, a big challenge is staffing, but also infrastructure. Momentum Recycling didn’t pick up in that area until recently, according to Marina, a coordinator with the catering group.
Prior to Momentum taking over, Spoil to Soil handled recycling for the area. They required them to separate out food waste into finer categories, Marina said, which made reducing waste more difficult.
“They wanted us to separate meats and bones and things … and so then we have to translate that to our employees. And I had to come up with all of these policies,” she said.
That had created a larger lift for Done To Your Taste than some other businesses had to contend with.
With Momentum Recycling taking the reins, it’s getting easier, and the Kamas-based caterer wants to be a leader on the issue.
“My entire company, they’re very driven to get this happening and going,” Marina said. “And so we’ve talked to our community a lot, and I do know once we start a successful composting, then other restaurants in the area will also follow.”
In thinking about how to approach the goal of total zero food waste, it can be helpful to remember that reducing some food waste, if not all, is still a worthwhile goal, said Tom Cote, a sous chef at Stein Eriksen Lodge.
“I think one of the biggest issues is this sort of ‘either-or’ mentality, like we’re either fully on board with this or we’re not,” Cote said.
For a place like Stein Eriksen, where food service ranges from banquets to table service to buffets, figuring it out all at once can be overwhelming and lead to an unwillingness to engage the issue, Cote said. The goal then is to choose one area and not get lost in the minutiae of others.
“That’s the realistic goal, is to focus on one specific area,” he said. “Ultimately, (that’s) what’s going to allow us to be even remotely successful in the project.”
The day continued with several guest speakers from Summit County Health, Savoury Kitchen and Waste Less Solutions, a Salt Lake-based nonprofit that rescues edible food and diverts it to the food insecure.
Post workshop, it’s time for these businesses to figure out the nitty gritty. ReFED is setting up one-on-one technical assistance sessions, according to Megan Fleming, director of marketing at Park City Community Foundation. Together they’ll create tailored resources and discuss action plans.
Anyone interested in reducing their food waste can learn more, sign up for composting and get in touch with ReFED via parkcitycf.org/zerofoodwaste.
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