Source Reduction in Action: A Mini Case Study for Food Donors
For caterers and other food service providers, ordering and planning a daily meal service for an entire office or workforce is no easy task. More often than not, over-ordering and difficulties with forecasting office attendance can result in a consistently large volume of food surplus within a workplace.
This situation is the one that our donor (who we’ll call OfficeSpace) found themselves in when they initially reached out to us to work together back in 2021. At the time, OfficeSpace was managing 3 different office buildings, which each had their own catering service for employee lunches. These lunches consisted of individually packaged, freshly prepared meals - like salads, grain and rice bowls, and protein options. Unfortunately, due to workplace changes related to COVID-19, many of these lunches would go uneaten - resulting in large amounts of food waste.
To address this issue, OfficeSpace partnered with Replate in order to rescue these fresh meals from all three of their office sites - 5 days per week. Each day, Monday through Friday, our food rescuer would visit all 3 offices to collect any surplus lunches - resulting in hundreds of pounds of food being rescued and donated rather than wasted.
The program was so effective that OfficeSpace ended up adding a fourth office site to the lineup - having now four total offices with active food recovery programs.
After a year or so of this program, OfficeSpace used insights from their Replate dashboard to begin reviewing the amount of food they had been donating. OfficeSpace began to meet internally to make source reduction plans based on this information.
Source reduction is the practice of preventing waste before it is created. In the context of workplace catering, source reduction means reducing surplus food at the point of origin—such as improving ordering accuracy, optimizing portion sizes, or adjusting catering strategies—so that excess food is minimized or eliminated altogether, rather than just being donated or discarded.
OfficeSpace proceeded to take the following steps to reduce their food waste levels:
Switched to a 1:1 ordering ratio in some offices to prevent over-ordering - this means that orders are based on exact numbers rather than estimates.
Cut back on the number of food service providers, reducing the flow, volume and variety of food coming into the office overall.
Centralized surplus to just one office building rather than 4.
By making these changes, OfficeSpace reduced its surplus levels by a substantial amount. The office was also able to cut back the number of food rescue days to 4 rather than 5. Previously, each building was donating anywhere from 700 to 1,200 lbs of food every week, resulting in nearly (and sometimes more than) 10,000 lbs of surplus total (monthly) from the OfficeSpace account as a whole.
After the source reduction adjustments, OfficeSpace now donates less than 300 lbs every week from just a single building, rather than all four.
While these lower numbers do result in less frequent donations, less waste overall is the main goal. Food recovery and donation should be viewed as tools in combating or mitigating waste rather than catch-all solutions that companies become too reliant on.
In the case of OfficeSpace, instead of relying solely on Replate's food recovery services, they took a more proactive approach by implementing source reduction strategies. While they still use our services when needed, these internal changes will contribute to a more sustainable future in the long run. This case study highlights the importance of regularly reviewing sustainability and impact metrics, as this information played a key role in guiding the food donor’s decisions.
Want to learn more about Replate? Click here!
Food donation is now law in California. Read the latest information about SB1383 here.