• Imperfectly Delicious Produce’s goal: no vegetable left behind

    To fight food waste and support local farmers, foodservice company Compass Group USA and its subsidiary Bon Appetit Management Company have launched the Imperfectly Delicious Produce (IDP) program to rescue and incorporate misshapen fruits and vegetables into recipes served in thousands of kitchens.
    March 31, 2015
    3 min read

    Pity the unpretty potato and the twisted turnip. Millions of tons of perfectly edible, wholesome fruits and vegetables get wasted every year because their size, shape, or color don’t exactly match the food industry’s stringent cosmetic standards. Some are left in fields to rot or get disked under, or are rejected later during processing. But when you’re slicing, dicing, chopping, and cooking, flavor matters a lot more than looks.
    To fight food waste and support local farmers, foodservice company Compass Group USA and its subsidiary Bon Appetit Management Company have launched a groundbreaking program, Imperfectly Delicious Produce (IDP), to rescue and incorporate these fruits and vegetables into recipes served in their thousands of kitchens.
    Starting in May 2014, the two companies successfully piloted the program at locations in California, Pennsylvania, and Washington state, and are now rolling it out in Oregon and Washington DC, with plans to expand it to the rest of the nation. More than 10,000 pounds of 31 varieties of fruits and vegetables, from misshapen organic carrots and leeks to loose kale leaves, were recovered during just the first few months of the pilot program.
    “It feels really good to know that all this produce that we’ve been pulling off to the side and sending to the compost pile has a home now,” says Tim Terpstra, of 250-acre Ralph’s Greenhouse in Mt. Vernon WA, which has supplied crooked carrots, fingerling potatoes, and undersized leeks to Bon Appetit’s Taste Restaurant at the Seattle Art Museum and Seattle-area universities and corporate cafes operated by Bon Appetit and Compass subsidiary Eurest through the IDP program. Click here to see a video about the program.
    Bon Appetit has long fought food waste as part of its Low Carbon Diet initiative—decomposing food in landfills emits methane, a potent greenhouse gas—and supported local farms through its Farm to Fork and other targeted purchasing programs. Compass Group USA is likewise committed to driving new culinary approaches for healthy, delicious, and sustainable food.
    To launch IDP, Compass Group’s Christine Seitz and Bon Appetit’s Claire Cummings donned hairnets to visit the fields and processing facilities of big and small growers (including Church Brothers in California and Ralph’s Greenhouse in Washington). They stopped to nibble on Cascadia greens (the inner leaves of romaine) and loose broccoli florets and ask about their fate. They visited aggregators such as LA & SF Specialty in Los Angeles and San Francisco and Charlie’s Produce in Seattle to discuss how to hack their existing ordering platforms in order to add a section for limited, time-sensitive purchases of imperfect produce.
    Participating Bon Appetit and Compass chefs are enthusiastic about IDP, but rolling out the program takes time. Each regional supply chain has its own quirks, and no large-scale system exists for rescuing produce. So each new region requires engaging its distributors and their growers, learning what they have available, and figuring out how to plug into their existing processes and ordering systems. But with every area that joins the program, the two companies move closer to their goal of no vegetable left behind.
    Access www.compass-usa.com or www.bamco.com for further information.

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