Sanchez questions Anderson on food donation and Donate NYC portal

One of the department's goals for the draft swamp includes expanding food donation and other edible food recovery efforts.

How does the department plan to do that specifically?

It notes that it will work to increase the amount of food donated by businesses.

Have you already started that work, and what does that work entail specifically?

And then does the department plan to expand the Donate NYC portal that already exists?

And then how much food waste does the department currently estimate it collects from food service establishments?

Sure.

So I'll respond to those questions in order.

I think first and foremost, we do a lot of work with the Mayor's Office of Food Policy, and they really lead the work around food rescue, food donation, and feeding hungry New Yorkers.

They convene all of the food recovery partners, everything from large organizations like City Harvest and Food Bank for New York City, down to neighborhood pantries or folks

doing work in their community.

One of the steps that I think will be really helpful in this space is the additional language that the council added to the commercial organics law, which takes effects later this year, which requires commercial carters to provide information about food donation

to each of the businesses that they have that participates in.

compost collection, which will be mandatory for all businesses in New York City as of next year.

And I think that will really close the loop there.

As far as the Donate NYC Food Portal, I think, to be frank, it's not a very productive use of our resources.

This is a space where there are lots of organizations already operating really effectively.

And to ask government to come in and make these kinds of connections on a business-to-business level, I think really just is not super productive.

And we haven't moved a lot of material through that portal since it was created, I don't know, probably seven or eight years ago.

So I think probably where we are better suited to apply our resources is in capacity building for the nonprofits that are already operating in this space.

I think one of the things that we hear from them is transportation and real estate are two of the biggest constraints that they have.

If we can, as a city, provide more resources to help solve some of those problems, I think they could probably achieve a lot more than we could through the food donation portal.

And then as far as numbers around food waste donated or rescued, I'll turn it over to Kate for this.

Yeah, thank you.

So I think there's two important numbers to look at here.

There's the food portal that we have, and then there's also the Donate NYC program partners with food rescue networks across the city, as the commissioner has mentioned.

And so for the food donations through the portal, you know, we've seen over the years,

You know, it's around, you know, it's kind of decreased.

It started out strong, but we really only got one-time funding for that program.

And so in the recent years, you know, it's been around five tons a year.

The partners, you know, which include places like City Harvest, those numbers are much bigger, right?

So we can really see what they're doing, you know, and that's closer to like around 40,000 tons a year.

So you can really see that like the partners are doing a great job.

And as the commissioner mentioned, we're working very closely with the mayor's office of food policy to

support those groups and what they're doing and we've actually been meeting with them.

We had a summit last fall with all the food rescue networks and then we've been had we have several meetings to try to address some of the challenges around technology, transportation and logistics as the commissioner mentioned and

you know, I think that's MOFP is really taking the lead there, but sanitation is happy to support.

And just generally, do you know how much actual food waste you're getting from restaurant establishments?

So that's, you mean like, so organics are collected by private haulers, not by sanitation.

Is that, I'm sorry, is that the question?

No, but if they're not like actually, you know, estimating how much food just actually goes to waste.

That we don't, we don't have those numbers yet, but maybe as we see the commercial waste program roll out, we are hoping to get better data around that.

Okay.