MAY 2018CIOAPPLICATIONS.COM 19f you knew you could save your company money, help your community, and boost employee moraleall costing you next to nothing to implement and little upfront timewould you do it?Recovering surplus food from your business or event is the simple, big impact trend you may not be considering. Food recovery works to address an alarming paradox in the United States food system: 40 percent of food that is produced ends up in landfills, while one in six Americans struggle with food insecurity. Imagine if your company hosted a luncheon, put on a conference, or operated a cafe and 40 percent of the food was thrown away at the end of the day. Food waste costs Americans $218 billion every year, accounts for 25 percent of freshwater use, and constitutes 23 percent of methane emissions--a greenhouse gas 21 times more harmful than carbon dioxide. Studies have shown that if food waste were a country, it would be the world's third largest emitter of greenhouse gases, behind the U.S. and China.At Food Recovery Network, a national network of more than 230 chapters at colleges and universities, we are committed to fighting food waste and feeding REGINA NORTHOUSE, EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR AND HAYLEY BRUNDIGE, COMMUNICATIONS & PARTNER ENGAGEMENT FELLOW, FOOD RECOVERY NETWORK cXo insightsFood Recovery: The Simple Step Your Business Can Take To Help Your CommunityIRegina Northousepeople. We provide guidance and resources to student leaders who recover surplus food from their dining halls after class and business leaders who wish to make their companies more sustainable while saving money. Our model at FRN promotes two of the approaches to reducing food waste outlined by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency's Food Recovery Hierarchy: source reduction and feeding hungry people with surplus food. Our chapters have recovered more than 2.7 million pounds of food, reducing CO2 emissions by more than 4.8 million kilograms. We're experts at establishing food recovery programs, big and small, to help businesses get started doing the right thing.Through FRN's Food Recovery Verified (FRV) program, we recognize and reward businesses across sectors that are donating surplus food at least once per month to nonprofits. We created this program because the thousands of students in our networka very powerful blocwanted to know that businesses, restaurants, and events were also doing the right thing with their surplus food. We now work with more than 113 accounts in 32 states that represent 15 sectors, including corporate dining, museums, hospitals, and hotels. A few of our FRV accounts include Bon Appétit dining at Best Buy Headquarters, Twitter, Inc., and Zulily as well as Sodexo accounts at Humana HUB and Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center.Our FRV program can provide businesses with several services and benefits. First, we offer third party verification of your food recovery program and recognition by the largest student movement comprised of thousands of people passionate about reducing food waste. Tax incentives may also be available to organizations donating surplus food to
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