Every year, the United States throws away over 60 million tons of food that was still good to eat, even though millions of people experience food insecurity.
We have built one economy around growing food and another around hauling it to landfills, yet there’s almost nothing in between that reliably moves the surplus from the people who have too much to the people who have none.
Now the waste industry is being handed part of the fix. Cities and states are passing laws to keep organic material out of landfills, and the intent behind them is good. But most of these programs are quietly making the same choice. They pour money into composting and treat feeding people as an afterthought. We are taking food someone could eat tonight and grinding it into soil amendment instead.
I have spent the better part of a decade building the systems that connect surplus food to the people who need it. The hardest part of this work has never been finding food donations. There is plenty of food and willing food donors. The hard part is that the people who manage waste and the people who feed communities almost never talk to each other. They sit in different offices, answer to different budgets, and solve the same problem from opposite ends without ever comparing notes.
Glendale, California, a Careit customer, is a great example and one of the few places that has decided to change that. In a city where one in four residents does not always know where their next meal will come from, the local government stopped treating food rescue as charity and began treating it as infrastructure. What they built should make every waste professional in the country look twice.
The step is the one we keep skipping
The EPA’s Wasted Food Scale is clear about the order. Feeding people ranks above composting. Compost is a good outcome for food no one can eat. It’s the wrong first stop for food someone still can.
On average, about a quarter of the organic waste a business throws out is still edible. Not spoiled or unsafe, just unsold or close to a date on a label that has more to do with marketing than safety. When a diversion program sends that food straight to a compost facility, it skips the highest use of that food and the cheapest win available to the people running the program.
So why does compost win by default? It’s not because it works better, but because it’s standardized. You can add it on using the same trucks and routes you already run. It’s the same motion as trash, just to a different facility.
Food donation, by comparison, looks messy. It looks like a string of one-off favors that depend on a business calling a nonprofit when it happens to have extra. It feels disconnected and disjointed, so it gets left out of the plan.
The problem is operational, and this industry knows how to fix operational problems.
The silo is the real obstacle in diverting food waste
Here is the pattern I see again and again.
The person in charge of reducing organic waste thinks about it as a waste problem. They’re not in charge of the budget for feeding people. That belongs to someone in public health or the social safety net, often in the same city or county, often funded from the same pool of public money.
The two never connect. So the waste team builds toward compost, the food relief team scrambles to buy food, and the surplus that could have linked them quietly goes to a landfill or a digester. Nobody is doing anything wrong. They’re each doing their job inside the lines drawn around it. But the lines are the problem.
The reframe: treating donations like a route
The fix is simpler than building new infrastructure. Haulers already right-size their customers’ bins. They already make decisions about how to capture the most recyclables and the most organics at the lowest cost. Add one more question to that same conversation. How much of this is still edible, and could it be donated instead?
Then partner with a food recovery organization to run the pickups, the same way you would run any other route. Set the stops. Set the schedule. Track what moves. Once you do that, donation stops being a favor and becomes infrastructure. It looks and behaves exactly like the systems you already trust.
This is not theory. Nonprofits are already running food recovery like a second hauling operation. They go to businesses, recover edible food, and deliver it to agencies that distribute it to people. The route model works. It only needs the waste side to see it as part of the same job.
The numbers make the case clear
The reason this should matter to a waste professional is not only that it’s the right thing to do, though it is. It’s that the math is in your favor.
Composting infrastructure costs real money and takes years. It needs facilities, permits, equipment, and a lot of people at the table. Food donation costs almost nothing to start. The food is already there. The trucks already drive past it.
Most haulers I talk to aren’t making money on compost. They offer it because they have to, and they lose money doing it. Every ton of edible food you divert upstream is a ton you don’t have to haul, sort, or process. Less tonnage, fewer truck rolls, lower cost. The case is clear.
I recently spoke with a public works director in a mid-size city who laid out his situation plainly. No budget. One of his two landfills closing. No composting infrastructure and no realistic way to fund or pass one anytime soon. He was stuck. When I told him that donation could pull a quarter of his organic stream out of the waste system at almost no cost, and that he could start now, his answer was simple. He had not thought of it that way, and he wanted in.
That is the opportunity hiding in plain sight. The food relief system in this country is under enormous strain. Public food assistance is being cut while need continues to rise. Rescued food eases that pressure directly, and it comes from the same surplus you are already paying to throw away. The waste budget and the food budget draw from the same well. Connecting them is a rare thing in government work. It’s a win on both sides of the ledger.
Diverting food doesn’t mean giving up composting
To be clear, none of this replaces composting. Donation is a first stop, not a substitute. Whatever cannot be donated still goes to compost or the waste stream, exactly as it does today.
All you are doing is giving edible food one chance to feed a person before it becomes feedstock. There’s no downside to that. You keep every option you have now and add a better one in front of it.
Visibility is what makes it all work
The reason donation has stayed disjointed for so long is that no one could see the whole picture at once. The business with surplus, the nonprofit that can take it, the driver moving it, and the city that has to prove the program works were all in separate systems, or in no system at all
That is the gap my team set out to close. We built one place where every part of the chain connects:
- A business posts the food it has
- A recovery organization claims it and runs the pickup
- The receiving agency records what it gave out
- The city sees all of it in real time, down to the pound, by food type and by location.
No one has to chase anyone for a report because the data is already there.
This is not a concept. It’s how Glendale operates today. The city, its waste consultant, the recovery organization, the agencies, and the donating businesses all work from the same shared system. That coordination is the reason a mid-size city can stand behind its numbers rather than guess at them.
Visibility is what turns a good intention into a program you can fund, report on, and defend.
This version of the system already works
Glendale shows what this looks like in practice. The city did not wait for the perfect infrastructure. It brought together a waste consultant, a food recovery organization, and a shared system that let everyone see the same data. The recovery group ran the pickups as a route, effectively acting as a second hauler for the city.
The result is not a pilot or a press release. In 2024 alone, more than 400,000 pounds of food were recovered and redistributed in Glendale. It lands at agencies like the local Salvation Army, which feeds 400 to 450 families a month and took in over 100,000 pounds last year. Three years in, this is simply how the city operates.
While California is the only state with a mandate forcing this conversation, look at what one mid-size city is producing. Now consider every place that has no mandate and no program, throwing away the same edible quarter, week after week, with nothing catching it.
That’s the missed opportunity. The cheapest, fastest diversion win you have is not a new facility. It’s already sitting in the bin, still good, waiting for someone to decide it should feed a person first.
Before you fund the next compost program, ask how much of that stream could feed your community instead. A quarter of the waste is edible. A quarter of your neighbors are hungry. The work is connecting the two. That’s what we built Careit to do, and Glendale is proof it works.
