Organic recycler Denali has helped HelloFresh recover ‘nearly 4 million pounds’ of its food scraps, then repurpose it into compost and animal feed.
The food diversion programme began last year, with a focus on recycling pre-consumer food waste from HelloFresh’s facilities in Goodyear and Phoenix, Arizona, U.S. Innovative Waste Recycling (IWR) provided the logistics.
Denali’s advanced depackaging machinery is designed to cleanly and mechanically separate cardboard, plastic, and other packaging from food that cannot be placed in HelloFresh meal kits because of quality issues – usually produce, dairy products, and bread – or because they are too close to their expiration dates.
To create compost, the machinery mixes the HelloFresh organics with lawn clippings, tree limbs, and other green waste. This is said to result in over 20,000 tons of nutrient-rich compost for farms and gardens in Phoenix every year, which apparently equates to one million one-cubic-foot retail bags of soil.
Alternatively, it is repurposed into animal feed for local farmers. In either case, the companies claim that, by the end of 2024, they will have directed 4 million pounds of food waste away from landfills and back into agriculture. In turn, they estimate that 1,307 tons of CO2 will be prevented from entering the atmosphere.
“At HelloFresh, we are on a mission to create a more sustainable food system,” said Jeff Yorzyk, senior director of Sustainability, HelloFresh North America. “Denali enables us to repurpose inedible food and instead use it to feed animals and produce compost for gardens and other agricultural needs throughout Arizona.
“We are committed to further reducing food waste at all our U.S. processing centres and are grateful for partners like IWR and Denali who help us achieve these sustainable practices.”
“HelloFresh is an innovator in disrupting the traditional food supply chain with its sustainable business model and tremendous efforts in reducing food waste throughout their processing centers,” added Ilia Kostov, chief revenue officer at Denali. “Denali is proud to be their recycling partner in the state of Arizona where our collaboration demonstrates the potential to revolutionize how we recycle inedible food for the benefit of communities and the planet.”
Compost consisting of HelloFresh food scraps can be now purchased in stores around the Phoenix area.
In a previous effort to minimize food waste, HelloFresh worked with Keep-it, Zebra Technologies, Thünen Institute, and Wageningen University to test and promote time-temperature indicators in packaging. These are designed to gauge storage and temperature conditions to display the shelf life of products in real-time, which was thought to achieve a 15% food waste reduction potential.
Meanwhile, Unilever and Too Good to Go announced a home delivery service for food approaching its sell-by date. Rather than let it go to waste, the companies claimed to have spared 16 million meals from unnecessary disposal to order these leftover food products to their doorsteps.
More recently, other companies have also sought to reintegrate useful resources into agriculture. Soilfood has teamed up with Metsä Board to use fibrous side streams from the latter’s mills in bedding for farm animals, then spread it onto arable land to increase the carbon stock of the soil.
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