Unwasted: The Podcast

Recovering Restaurant Food Waste with Sabine Valenga of Food for All

February 10, 2020 Imperfect Foods Season 1 Episode 17
Unwasted: The Podcast
Recovering Restaurant Food Waste with Sabine Valenga of Food for All
Show Notes

Every year in the US, over 700,000 restaurants throw away 11 million pounds or over 25 billion dollars worth of food. 

To help turn this around, Sabine Valenga helped found Food For All, a business that sources surplus food from restaurants and lets individuals pick it up for a discount. Sabine's revolutionary business model is helping restaurants dramatically reduce how much food they waste each day and is helping Americans from all walks of life get access to the food they want for less. 

Learn how Sabine helped start Food For All as a graduate student and why restaurants have so much food waste in the first place. We also get into a delicious solution for surplus herbs, how businesses and nonprofits can actually work together to reduce waste, and what Sabine thinks many people misunderstand about hunger in America. 

Whether you're an aspiring entrepreneur, a budding environmentalist, or just hungry for ways to save money on convenient meals, this episode has something for you. 


Show Notes: 

  • Learn more about Food for All on their website
  • Sabine first learned about food waste from the hilarious and eye-opening feature that John Oliver did about it in 2015
  • Food for all tackles waste that happens in restaurants. You can see a graph of where exactly food waste happens from ReFED here 
  • Sabine and the Food for All team work closely with the Greater Boston Food Bank. You can learn more about them and support their work here 
  • The UN Food and Agriculture Organization found that we'd only need to recover 1/4 of all of the food that we waste globally every year to feed everyone in need on our planet
  • To help make food more accessible to everyone, regardless of their income level, Imperfect offers a reduced-cost box program
  • The federal government recently announced its cuts to food stamps
  • Sabine's tip for using up extra herbs is to chop them up and combine them with yogurt to make a quick and easy dip
  • Sabine is a fan of the work Urban-X is doing to improve life in cities
  • My Fresh Bowl is an urban vending machine that serves healthy food
  • Reilly recently had a productivity breakthrough thanks to the Pomodoro technique
  • Sabine's go-to food to make someone feel loved is Pão de Queijo, a traditional Brazilian  cheese bread
  • Sabine has not one but 3 go-to karaoke songs!
  • Sabine admires the work of architect Andres Jaque