A successful food recovery program leverages partnerships to move beyond waste reduction and directly support your business goals and the communities you serve.
By Regina Harmon
We have all seen the leftover food at a hotel breakfast buffet or the remnants of a spread at a conference or corporate event. The hospitality industry predominantly views this surplus food as an inevitable waste stream instead of as an opportunity to redirect excess to neighbors experiencing food insecurity. Simple process adjustments can create an eco-friendly, socially conscious, cost-saving, waste management solution.
According to the USDA, more than one-third of the nation鈥檚 food supply ends up in landfills. Simultaneously, 1 in 4 American adults are facing food insecurity, meaning that the average person knows someone who is experiencing food hardship, even if you are not aware of it. This number is on the rise, with the percentage of working-age Americans reporting household food insecurity increasing from 19.9 percent in 2021 to 27.7 percent in 2025. Working with hunger-fighting partners to redirect surplus food from hotels and large events can help meet this growing need. By integrating food recovery into everyday operations, hospitality leaders have the opportunity to transform their food waste management programs, strengthen their own sustainability efforts, and support their local communities.
The Mutual Benefits of Food Recovery
While the benefits of giving back to the millions of people facing food hardship are at the heart of food recovery efforts, investing in these initiatives directly supports business goals as well. Hospitality organizations like Marriott are making commitments to net-zero emissions or carbon neutrality by 2030. To meet these timelines, diverting food from landfills is essential. Currently, food waste ranks as the third highest contributor of greenhouse gases in the U.S. Redirecting perfectly good food to hunger relief partners is a critical step to prevent these excess greenhouse gases by complementing other sustainable processes, including recycling, composting, HVAC solutions, and more.
Commitment to food recovery also demonstrates community leadership to stakeholders. A growing emphasis on corporate social responsibility underscores the importance of following through on community commitments as a key driver to establish and maintain brand loyalty and employee engagement. When organizations can share that they are dedicated to supporting the local community and reducing waste, they earn trust and respect from the community and their very own staff who care about these issues as well.
Breaking Down Barriers to Entry
Similar to recycling and trash pickup, food recovery is an investment. While integrating these initiatives may require upfront costs, businesses often see a return on their investment. This includes tax benefits or the ability to renegotiate waste hauling fees due to less organics being thrown away. Working with a partner to plan and schedule food recovery can also help mitigate costs and labor associated with transportation, gas, staff time, materials, and more.
Business leaders also consider liability concerns when it comes to donating prepared food. However, federal and state legislation creates legal protections. Nationally, the 1996 Bill Emerson Good Samaritan Law protects organizations from lawsuits as long as the food met all quality and safety regulations at the time of donation, and the 2023 Food Donation Improvement Act expands on this law with added protections for direct-to-consumer and reduced-price donations. State and federal policies have encouraged food recovery for decades. These laws provide legal protections so that organizations intending to do the right thing by donating excess food have a safety net.
Integrating Food Recovery into Your Business Model
Businesses that approach food recovery holistically by embedding the program into their daily operations and culture often see the most success. The following actionable steps will allow your team to build a sustainable food recovery program that supports your business goals.
Step 1: Connect with Food Recovery Resources and Identify Opportunities to Rescue Food
Exploring available resources on the national and local level can support your team in developing a program that works to further your business goals and addresses your waste management needs. Experienced nonprofit partners can offer consultation on opportunities for food recovery with support for the process of collecting, transporting, and distributing donated food safely and efficiently.
Programs like Food Recovery Verified streamline the process by mobilizing a national network and developing a plan to rescue food and meet sustainability goals. Food Recovery Verified experts consult with food businesses and venues to develop a food recovery plan and offer services such as recovering food from large-scale events and supporting warehouses with donations. Becoming verified also demonstrates to customers a commitment to reducing waste and making a positive impact.
Step 2: Integrate Food Recovery into the Budget
Planning and ensuring transparency into partnership and process costs will support an effective program. When you are initially integrating food recovery efforts into the budget, balance the expected investment with potential cost offsets, including reduced waste management expenses. Beyond waste management, food recovery can also naturally fit into sustainability or corporate social responsibility budgets. Event management companies, like Hosts Global, that offer food recovery as an add-on have a leg up on the competition when potential clients are looking to satisfy any sustainability goals.
If implementing a long-term food recovery program for your organization or venue, the initial program will require an investment in employee training on donation procedures, proper documentation, and maintaining food safety standards. Throughout the lifetime of the program, the cost of logistics will depend on the established processes and the partners your team chooses. These costs may include storage, packaging, transportation, or refrigeration capacity. Evaluating your team鈥檚 capacity for food storage and transportation can lay the foundation to develop processes that work within your systems and budget.
For singular events, the food recovery organization will have food safety-trained staff ready to manage the logistics of a surplus food donation.
Step 3: Communicate Purpose
Logistics become a secondary priority when the organizational culture is committed to food recovery. Ensuring the entire team is invested is the foundation of successful activation. When leadership communicates the purpose of these initiatives, everyone involved understands how their role matters to support the community, environment, and organization.
Staff working events will know that the food they prepare and serve will have benefits that extend beyond the event itself, building trust that none of their talent and efforts will go to waste. This supports employee engagement and encourages the team to work together with a common purpose.
Step 4: Integrate Food Recovery Initiatives into Daily Operations and Events
By establishing clear procedures, food recovery can become routine for your team and deliver lasting value. This starts with building processes into existing workflows to minimize additional labor and help your team ensure accountability for things like refrigeration needs and packaging requirements. With the right training and resources, team members can identify, label, package, and record eligible donations seamlessly during their shift instead of dedicating separate time to food recovery. Leveraging technology, such as inventory management systems and digital documentation tools, can simplify this process, and working with partners on consistent pickup schedules allows the team to prepare accordingly for donations.
For teams going beyond daily operations and planning an event of any size, building food recovery into the budget during the initial stages of planning streamlines the process and ensures there are no surprise costs. Every event and party ends with excess food that can be repurposed. For teams hosting small events, solutions can be as simple as having compostable containers on hand to send guests home with leftovers. For large-scale events with more than 300 people, the most efficient method for cleanup is partnering with a food recovery organization to recover everything from ingredients to prepared meals to leftover uneaten meals with the goal of donating surplus food to local hunger relief partners.
Step 5: Track the Impact
A sustainable food recovery program measures success over time to identify opportunities for improvement and measure impact for the business as a whole. Tracking the cost savings of food recovery programs requires calculating the return on investment in the program from direct returns, such as tax incentives, and avoided costs, such as waste hauling fees, disposal tax, and excess ordering.
Beyond general tax incentives for donations, the federal government offers enhanced deductions for eligible food donations to nonprofits. This allows companies to deduct up to 15 percent of their taxable income for food donations. Food recovery organizations count every pound of donated food to support companies in tracking for tax purposes.
Businesses often notice additional benefits that come with food recovery programs over time from avoided costs. Partnering with food recovery organizations can shine a light on what goes uneaten. This simple observation can help businesses reduce spend through more efficient ordering. By streamlining waste and recovery processes and tracking what ends up in donations, teams are better equipped to optimize operations.
Tracking and showcasing the social and environmental impact of the program can also support positive brand image. Partners can provide valuable data that your team can share with stakeholders, including metrics such as the number of meals supplied to the community and the amount of greenhouse gas prevented from entering the atmosphere due to your food recovery efforts.
Finding the Right Solutions for Your Needs
For hospitality industry leaders aiming to integrate food recovery into waste management solutions and set a standard for other businesses, the most important element is understanding the options best suited for your needs. Exploring partnerships with food recovery organizations and local hunger relief partners can help identify opportunities to work together to enact change. A successful food recovery program leverages partnerships to move beyond waste reduction and directly support your business goals and the communities you serve. | WA
Hands-On Partnerships
Food Recovery Network鈥檚 partnership with the Gaylord Pacific and Gaylord National Resorts and Convention Center is an example of a fully integrated program in action. Food Recovery Network picks up frozen surplus food bi-weekly from these partners, establishing a natural cadence to ensure hunger-fighting partners have room at their locations to receive the food. This partnership has resulted in the recovery of more than 100,000 pounds of food to date. The success of partnerships like these centers on the time, care, and transparency between all parties to support consistent operations week over week.
In addition, for the past six years, Food Recovery Network has partnered with Super Bowl Sunday tailgates taking place just outside of the stadium. This past year, Food Recovery Network worked with Guy Fieri鈥檚 Flavortown and The Players Tailgate to rescue more than 14,000 pounds of food on the day of the Big Game, benefiting three key hunger-fighting partners in the community. Food Recovery Network volunteers supported the process of packaging and transporting perfectly good, unserved food in rented vans and trucks to local partners. In the span of one afternoon, the effort resulted in more than 11,000 meals for people experiencing hunger in the Bay Area.
Regina Harmon serves as CEO of Food Recovery Network (FRN), a student-led movement that has recovered and donated 25M+ pounds of food to date. Recognized as one of the most influential leaders in the food industry by SELF magazine and Food Tank, Harmon has been a pivotal voice in raising awareness and harnessing action to reduce food waste, end hunger, and positively impact the environment over the past 10 years. Under her leadership, FRN has united 8,000+ college students, food suppliers, farmers, and local businesses across the U.S. in the fight against climate change and hunger. As a board member of Food Tank and a member of ReFED鈥檚 Advisory Council, Harmon emphasizes the need to address racial disparities in the food system, disproportionately affecting health and economic outcomes, highlighting the importance of working together to enact change.
If your business could benefit from an environmentally conscious waste management solution, visit the Food Recovery Network Resource Hub at to find toolkits, guidance, and local partners accepting donations. For more information, visit .
Resources
www.usda.gov/about-food/food-safety/food-loss-and-waste
www.urban.org/research/publication/food-insecurity-remained-high-2025-safety-net-cuts-loom
www.foodrecoverynetwork.org/frv