Chick-fil-A announced last month it was joining the U.S. Food Waste Pact, a national voluntary agreement that was launched in late 2023 to help food businesses reduce their food waste. In doing so, it became the first restaurant company to join the initiative, which is led by nonprofit partners ReFED and the World Wildlife Fund.
The point of the pact, and its “Target, Measure, Act” framework, is to quantity and report food waste data to better understand its scope. It also enables collaboration with other signatories who participate in work groups and pilot projects to come up with effective solutions. The pact’s goal is to reduce and prevent wasted food by 50% by 2030.
For Heather Beaubien, Chick-fil-A’s director of sustainability, joining the initiative was a no-brainer.
“We’ve had a focus on food waste for years,” Beaubien said during a recent interview, adding that it makes sense as a restaurant company to try and reconcile food waste and food insecurity issues. According to ReFED, for instance, 38% of all food in the U.S. goes unsold or uneaten, while one in 10 Americans face food insecurity.
Chick-fil-A’s focus here sharpened in 2012 when an operator started what is now the company’s Shared Table program. The purpose of the program is to donate restaurants’ surplus food to local food shelters, soup kitchens and nonprofits. Since that launch, 23 million meals have been donated to those in need in Chick-fil-A communities across the country. What excites Beaubien most about the U.S. Food Pact is that it spreads those efforts out to other organizations and companies.
“We realize this issue is so much bigger than one company and even one industry. This work is targeted not just to restaurants and foodservice, but also big retailers and manufacturers. That focus on industry collaboration is really what drew us to this,” Beaubien said. “Huge challenges like this will take all of us.”
She was also drawn to the obligations that are part of the pact, creating accountability around this work. Companies that sign on then share their food waste numbers, which are aggregated and anonymous. Those numbers then spark sessions on best practices. For Chick-fil-A, one of those best practices is conducting waste audits, or “dumpster diving.” The company hires a third-party company to look through restaurant dumpsters, pick out items, weigh them, measure them, and categorize them.
“This helps us understand what we’re wasting appropriately. Then we receive data insights as well and can benchmark progress against other signatories and learn from each other what’s working,” Beaubien said.
For its part, Chick-fil-A has a goal of diverging 25 million pounds of waste from landfills by 2025 and is working with a third-party company to verify its data toward that goal. Beaubien said the company’s target will grow as the company eyes 2030 and as it integrates with the U.S. Food Waste Pact. In addition to that pact and its Shared Table program, Chick-fil-A has also focused on other efforts for waste reduction, such as lean manufacturing taking a Six Sigma approach. Operators are cooking less food more often using data systems in their restaurants that provide an indication of how many items to prepare in a day.
The company is also piloting a composting program at over 130 restaurants, but this is a bit more challenging because not every market has the right composting infrastructure in place quite yet. That said, operators who are part of the test are seeing value in their composting efforts, Beaubien said.
“We have a saying at Chick-fil-A that what gets measured gets managed. We think we do a good job managing food waste, but there is always room for opportunity,” she said.
One such opportunity that potentially lies ahead is anaerobic digestion, a process through which bacteria break down food waste, or “a waste to energy-type thing,” Beaubien explained. Currently, this process is more developed in Europe, but she sees the possibility of bringing it stateside eventually.
“From a big picture perspective, food waste in landfills generates methane emissions and the more we can divert, the better off we all are. There are so many opportunities out there that the industry can follow to tackle really big problems,” Beaubien said. “We have doubled down on our food waste reduction. It’s not that we’re ignoring everything else, but the opportunities in food waste and how it intersects with a broader community need to solve food insecurity make a lot of sense for us as a restaurant company.”
Chick-fil-A’s solar microgrid test
Indeed, Chick-fil-A is not ignoring “everything else” as it pertains to sustainability work. The company is also testing a new solar-powered microgrid system in California and recently installed its second such system at a restaurant in Santa Rosa. The first was installed in Stockton in 2021 and a third is planned for Oceanside in September. The technology is used to reduce power usage and costs while also enabling restaurants to keep running even if their areas are impacted by planned or unplanned power outages in the area – a common (and increasing) occurrence throughout the state.
“If you live in California, you know our power grid struggles to keep up with demand,” Santa Rosa owner/operator Chris Medford said in a statement. “When we close unexpectedly, it can have a negative effect on our team members and guests, so we’re optimistic this system will alleviate stress while delivering more operational resiliency.”
The first pilot location in Stockton reduced the restaurant’s power costs by more than 10%, according to the company, while also adding 38% clean energy. Beaubien said the operational resiliency piece is just as important as the energy savings piece.
“Sometimes power outages are planned, sometimes they’re unplanned. In a busy restaurant with 40 to 50 team members and a full line of customers, when the power goes out and you don’t know when it’s coming back on, you don’t know if the food is going to go bad or if you need to shut off third-party delivery, that causes multiple problems and chaos,” she said. “The results of this test have been great for energy savings and even higher savings in operational opportunities that weren’t lost.”
Once Chick-fil-A adds a third power grid in the fall, the company will then determine how to proceed. Beaubien said the company will be intentional in examining what markets make sense based on these savings and operational disruption reduction. Cost-wise, the system isn’t hugely prohibitive, as the microgrid operates as a utility.
“It’s similar to software as a service. It’s not making that capital outlay, it’s more like a subscription model. I get passionate about this because people think sustainability initiatives cost money, but in the case of energy management and food waste, these can be savers,” Beaubien said. “The mindset that sustainability costs more money is not true; there are opportunities if you’re diligent. When opportunities like this come up, we will embrace them.”
Contact Alicia Kelso at [email protected]