No longer going to waste, if it doesn’t end up going to your waist. Starbucks is phasing in a plan to donate 100 percent of their unsold food. AFP PHOTO/Don EMMERT (Photo credit should read DON EMMERT/AFP/Getty Images)
So Starbucks recently announced that they will be donating 100 percent of their unsold food to charity. They currently are testing out a program in San Diego. When Starbucks announced their intentions, the company stated that they expect to donate five million meals to individuals and families this year and plan to eventually – over the next five years – be doing this at all of its 7,600 locations in the United States. By 2021, they say, they’ll have given away 50 million free meals.
In some ways, it may seem crazy that Starbucks, a crazy successful company, wasn’t doing that already, and, well, to be fair, since 2010, they have been donating unsold pastries. It’s just that now they’re donating perishables, too, like their salads and sandwiches.
But apparently, not so crazy. Many restaurant, diners and coffeehouse owners say that the logistics of donating food to homeless shelters and charities is a little trickier than you might think. That doesn’t mean it can’t be done, of course, or that restaurants, diners and coffeehouses shouldn’t try to donate food, of course, and plenty do. For instance, Devocion, a coffeehouse in Brooklyn (they have one in Colombia as well), donates any coffee beans older than 30 days old to City Harvest, a New York City food bank, and then you have much bigger corporations like Panera Bread that also gives away food that would otherwise be tossed out.
In fact, for some time now, Panera Bread has an extensive program that they called Day-End Dough-Nation (clever wordplay there), in which it donates perfectly good but not fresh food to soup kitchens, shelters and so on.
But, again, it takes some planning to give food away, if you’re going to do it on a regular basis. Some of the challenges all food establishments face in giving away food to charities include…
Food banks and shelters don’t always want or need what you have.Cecil Rodriguez, the executive chef at Beef & Barley in Chicago, says that he works with a local shelter to make sure food doesn’t go to waste, but in the beginning, it wasn’t always so easy.
