By Marc Rudow
UNC Asheville Dining Services, a partnership between Chartwells Higher Education and University of North Carolina Asheville, works hard to keep food waste to a minimum. The team at UNC Asheville Dining uses every tool available to feed students, and at the same time keeps about 11,000 pounds of food a month out of the trash.
The efforts to divert food waste are led by Chantal Fortin, the Sustainability and Marketing Manager for dining. Chartwells has made an enormous commitment to recycling and composting at the national level, and Chantal supplements that by recruiting members of her staff who work as her “champions” to keep the program working well at the local level.
Chartwells supports and encourages staff to reduce food waste as a matter of corporate policy,. As part of the company’s commitment, they have provided UNCA Asheville Dining Services with a waste reduction app called Waste Not 2.0 , which measures and analyzes food that’s sent to compost to help identify strategies for further waste elimination.
At the local level, this work is implemented entirely by staff who maintain high standards by carefully monitoring both food production and waste. The system features trayless dining (which has been shown to result in a huge reduction in wasted food), composts all food left on plates as well as kitchen scraps, makes regular donations of leftover food to Food Connection (which distributes donated food to folks experiencing food insecurity), and is partnering with NexTrex and local grocery stores to implement a program for recycling plastics, including plastic bags.
Chartwells also hosts a Stop Food Waste Day campaign in the spring where UNC Asheville Dining plans events, social media content, and other outreach efforts focused on ways to be more mindful about food waste.
This culture of saving, reusing, and composting has become a part of the entire campus culture. Students living in dorm rooms, for example, are offered compost containers for personal use, which are picked up and sent along with dining room kitchen scraps to Atlas Organics for composting.
By providing a culture conducive to eliminating waste, UNCA Dining is training a new generation (actually several generations over the years!) of students/diners to be a part of the food waste solution. Seeing this operation will make you want to go back to college to enjoy these delicious meals knowing that very little will go to waste.
In 2022, UNCA Dining Services has donated over 30,000 meals to community members who needed them. And kitchen employees get a free meal every day, further reducing waste!
Thanks to the UNC Asheville Dining team for setting up an incredible system that works from the top down to eliminate food waste — and is now also deeply imbedded in the university’s culture. If all institutions of this size would do as much as UNCA Dining does, we would feed a lot more folks and have a lot less waste.
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