How We Cut Food Waste, Delight People, and Make Money Doing It - Christina Grace, Foodprint Group

Josiah: I would love to kind of get into this by talking about the big problem or the dysfunction that you see in food systems today, of which of course, hospitality companies are a huge participant in that. What is the problem? What's broken that you're seeing in our world today in this area?

Christina: Well, I'll start by saying, as a food system person, I started at the, how do we get more regionally farmed food into the places we're eating? But as I've worked through the years at every single stage, looking at production and distribution and marketing and all this, and I've landed at what should be a circular place, so you never really end, but at that linear end of waste and realizing that over time learning that 30 to 40% of the food that we're growing is wasted every single day. Most of it's happening in retail places in our homes. At the same time, my focus was on local, regional, sustainable, organic, healthy. We are consuming a credit card's worth of microplastics in our food every week. That is not my idea of organic, healthy, safe. So part of what drives me here is that hotels, restaurants feed a lot of people. They're also a platform to teach people better practices, educate people about where their food is coming from, what it means to actually make these decisions so the food is fished more sustainably and other things. And for us, we're taking waste as our central, the avoidance of waste as our central focus because it's particularly food waste, it's a huge part of our carbon footprint. And if you've ever heard of Drawdown, it's a fabulous book that has the top, interventions for not just slowing down, but mitigating and reversing climate change. And the number one intervention is reducing food waste. And so here we are, this is what's driving us. And on top of that, hotels are responsible for about 1% of our carbon emissions every year. And so they're losing a lot of sleep, the hotel owners, operators, manager, they're just losing a lot of sleep over the impacts they're having. And they're also seeing their customers demanding experiences that tread lightly on the planet that are providing, you know, that they feel healthier when they leave than when they arrived. And so the time has come for what we're doing, I guess, but also it's so necessary, you know, because I'm a mom and I see my kids are going to be paying a bill that my grandparents started and their parents started and I don't want that. So here we are.

Josiah: You have an incredible client list from the biggest companies in the world, from Pfizer to Meta to Google to Discovery to within the hospitality world, the S.H. Rosewood Hotel Group, Eataly, these super iconic names. I wonder, maybe just to give you a sense of how you engage in projects. Let's say somebody is a leader at a hotel company. How do you think about working with them from the very earliest stages? What does a typical client engagement look like for you?

Christina: Well, for us working at the corporate level, so we're developing a zero waste program that's going to be consistent across all the properties, is critical. But all the real meaty work happens in the properties. And what is wonderful about waste and really challenging about it is every single employee and even every guest has a role to play. in eliminating it, right? In properly separating it and making sure you're recycling and you're composting your organic food waste. And so when we start in the dream world, we might get in at the design phase two years before that hotel opens and we are making sure that they plan for not just trash and mixed recycling and cardboard, but also are we gonna recycle mattresses? How are we gonna handle cooking oil? How are we gonna deal with Can we eliminate soap and bar soap and have dispensers? We're thinking about all the built-in design. And then we're thinking as we get closer to that OS&E of what are we ordering? Where is it coming from? Is it sustainable? How are we minimizing packaging? Can we not have any single-use plastics? Can we only use reusable dishware? So we get to that point. And then when opening comes, we've spent all this time with the pre-op opening team on employee training videos. We have an off-the-shelf toolkit of 72 tools, templates, best practice guides that we start to implement so that there's checklists for the housekeeping staff and we've worked with the F&B team. And we get all those moving parts in place because it is a design and it's a place design, a stuff design, and a people design problem we're solving. And then we launch it and then we have a tool that tracks that waste every day. We work with our clients to get the tracking in place. And then once they're kind of up and running with the program, we have this great opportunity with our certified zero waste events program to help them monetize what they've done. So I'm going to sell a zero waste program to Microsoft at all of the one hotel properties, for example, and then we're going to give them reports every year saying their waste aversion was over 90% and this is what they achieved and this was the carbon impact for their portfolio of events. That's us. That's what we do. But as you can imagine, we're like a fraction of the work. It's the head of F&B and management in the kitchen and the janitor. We have to build a team, train them, and that eventually we're gone and they're running it and they're training new people and they're moving through that hotel, that larger corporate operation to different hotels and bringing their expertise with them. Because that's our goal too, of just creating a community of experts who know this inside and out.

Josiah: Let's say somebody's listening to this, they love what you're talking about. I'm curious for you, if you look back to some of your most successful client engagements, these corporate brands that were engaged in the projects? Because I imagine it's a bit of a coalition here. Who are you getting on board?

Christina: Sure. So often we have, you know, if you're lucky enough where there's a head of sustainability at an operation, they're making the first call. But frankly, they're not making the decision. The decision is often happening. The COO around zero waste events, it's the head of sales or the chief sales officer, marketing officer, events teams. We need the highest levels of management engaged because this is one of those things where when you get busy, you know, sure, we've trained everybody, they launch, and then people start to backslide. Best practices start to drop off. There's so much, there's just a lot of turnover. New people aren't getting trained properly. It needs to be a priority at the top level. And the great thing about our reporting is if every month the management team is going through and saying, okay, these properties are at 90 are above diversion. These are at 70. How are we going to move these guys up the continuum? Can we learn from each other what's working and what's not? They have to talk about it. At One Hotels, for example, they have GM and sustainability team member meetings every month, and they talk about this. And they talk about what's working and what needs to change in there. It's because they're obviously a unicorn in the way that this is so much a part of their brand. But as we're moving towards a world where everyone has to do it, we're working with, say, Brookfield Hospitality. that's an owner of many brands trying to push this through the different groups or where, you know, Rosewood has multiple different brands that have different resources and capacity. And in a lot of places that may not even have recycling infrastructure, you know, in some of these very fragile resort locations where you've got to figure out, well, what are we going to do with all this? And we do it, but it's, but it takes a lot of collaboration. So to your point, high level management, then on the ground, the head of F&B, heads of housekeeping, and next level down management are critical, so critical.

Josiah: I'm thinking of the CEO who maybe has good intentions but gets caught up in all the stuff that is involved in leading a company. And what are some action items where you can kind of take this from, hey, this is a good idea, I need to act here and make sure it's an enduring part of the operation? Does it become part of the company's goals for the years? Some sort of external reporting? Is there any kind of practical things that move it from just a one-off conversation or idea?

Christina: Sure, sure. Well, there's pressure with ESG reporting now. I mean, there's been pressure in the EU for a long time in terms of investors really wanting to see not just greenwashing, but actual proof that you're really doing these things. And now the SEC is implementing the same things here. And so that pressure at the highest level for the investment, the owners, is growing, and that's putting pressure on the managers or the brands. Because as you know, there's so many different players at the table. And to be honest, it's easiest when the owner and the brand is the same. But that's rare now. So what you want is an owner that at least has a big stake in a brand or in a set of hotels where everybody stops to listen when they say, we really have to do this. Because while you're going to save money when you reduce your food waste, when you eliminate all those single use items, it takes a while to see those benefits. And you've got to do a lot of work. You've got to do a lot when you're training every employee on this and you're paying attention, you're tracking every day. It's a commitment. It's not a nice to have. It's a we're building this into our culture. And so that I think is a big deal. But I feel really, really optimistic because there are just so many companies now that are building it into their culture. They're making these big brand promises. And so we're just like, OK, we're here, we can help.

Josiah: Tell me a little bit more about what it looks like to build it into the culture successfully. Is there an example that comes to mind of an organization or a property that's done this really well instilling this into the culture?

Christina: I'm patting one hotel on the back because I can't understate what an incredible partner SH Hotels and 1 Hotel has been for us, and even making our products and services so much better, pushing us to innovate. They're doing a good job across all their properties. We're here and we work with the 1 Brooklyn Bridge team. We get to go, because we're based in Brooklyn, we get to go in and see them all the time very easily. And they are stellar. They're partnering with the Billion Oyster Project where their oyster shells are being recycled. They're doing all the standard corporate, no single use and beautiful dispensers in the rooms. And they are They've kicked it, crushed it really on their early Certified Zero Waste events, which SH Hotels has actually white labeled our program as Certified Sustainable Gatherings, which is beautiful. And they've really taken it and made it their own. There's a great example at Brooklyn Bridge where you have to have the F&B front and back of house on it when you're running a zero-waste event. You have to do all this planning ahead of time with the events team and really working closely with a host. And then you have the housekeeping team and everybody making sure that All of the waste is getting away and all the plastics, everything's being properly separated and we're keeping track. And they had a 300-person event with the Sierra Club that achieved 98% diversion, which means only 2% of all the materials used at that event were trashed. Only 2%, it's like brilliant. 300 people in an event is not nothing. It's a lot of work. That's an incredible result. Yeah. And it was an incredible result, but it took the team on it. And I think what's been really exciting about that program is that honest, I mean, and don't Not that people don't care deeply about everything, but because this is something that's so customer facing and partners, you know, it's such a deep partnership with clients and it's a sales opportunity. The head of sales shows up at all those calls and when they show up, everybody shows up. And when everyone shows up, we really get things done, right? There's no, it's such a priority. So that's, that I think is super exciting, but I, there are so many examples. We have, you know, Alta Morea group, which is a restaurant group, the high end, beautiful, beautiful places that has an incredibly engaged team. And they're also participating in a billion oyster auction. project and they're composting all their scraps and they have donations partners. And we had a great launch at Sofitel DC with Brookfield Properties and Sofitel in collaboration where they're pushing the envelope on their purchasing. They've made some really, really fun decisions on how do we get rid of those really difficult to recycle items. And they just had an incredible launch and we're tracking their waste perfectly in the first month, which hardly ever happens. You know, so I feel like it doesn't, you know, it's, it really, once a team is engaged and they see, it feels good. I mean, this is something we heard, you know, with Rosewood, we rolled out over COVID. We didn't get to go on site to any of their properties. We were working with people entirely remotely. And when we surveyed, you know, their first, I think it was once there were about 15 locations up and running and we surveyed their site leads. Who can be on the engineering team? They might be sustainability. They might be food and beverage. It depends on the hotel and who they can get to take ownership of this. And ask them, we thought they were going to tell us they loved the tracking and the data and all this other stuff. And they said it just made, the biggest thing was employee engagement and that it made people feel good. particularly at a time that was pretty grim because so many hotels had closed for so long. I mean, it was dark days. And that was really, really great to hear that it makes employees feel good about coming to work.

Josiah: I love that. I love that. I feel like what you mentioned is actually really cool because at a time where it can be tough to work in hospitality, I think that's been a recurring challenge over the last couple of years. That's really cool. I think it's always interesting when we talk about sustainability to make the business case for that, whether there's the ethical moral case, we should do this. There's the money saving case. But I think that human element of people feeling good is important. But I wonder if you could speak just a little bit more to the events piece of this, because you mentioned this being something you could monetize. It seems like it unlocks new revenue opportunities And the reason I'm so interested in that is I was actually just talking to the head of events for a very big tech company who is baking these sort of things into their criteria for the venues that they select. So it's more than just like this feel good thing. It's like you're going to get this really, really, it's like one of the top five tech companies group of business or you're not. And so tell us a little bit more about how operating sustainability is unlocking revenue in the sphere of events.

Christina: Well, it's super simple with this product because once we have trained our client teams and piloted a project and you know that first pilot and then maybe the next two or three events we're spending a lot of time making sure the proper vendor relationships are in place. because they've got to be able to order what they want and leave out what they don't and you need your vendors on board for that. Once that's sorted out, they continue to work with us just to actually review their scorecards and provide their carbon reporting. So if we're charging them $500 to certify an event, They're putting extra team time into it, but again, over time, they're putting less and less because it just becomes the way they do things, but they're charging for that event. They decide what they want to charge. Is it $5,000 more? Is it $7,000? That's up to them in terms of what the demand is and what their operating costs are to deliver on it because some events are 50 people in one day and some are three days and thousands, so for them, to kind of, and we work with them to kind of estimate what are gonna be those hours? What is that extra investment that I have to make so it's profitable? But that's the exciting thing is it's a product they're selling. And so that's a layup, whereas we've always been able to say, we know you're gonna pay for our program in the first year with cost savings, but we've never been able to say, and this is exactly how much you're gonna save. Because we don't know until we're in it and we're really doing it. And so this is, yeah,

Josiah: We are thrilled to have this, to be able to offer this service.

Josiah: Well, that's great. And I think it's exciting talking to you because you have a research background. You've worked on leadership roles across a whole range of organizations, including for the New York government, right? The New York State Department of Agriculture. And so you've seen this from so many angles, but you're very quantitative. And so I think it's really important that people take this kind of rigorous approach to this. Where can people go to learn more about you and your work?

Christina: Well, they certainly can go to our website, foodprintgroup.com. You know, we spend a lot of time sharing information on LinkedIn and we have Instagram. We love when you talk to our customers because they have the best stories to tell in terms of, like I said, we learn as much, if not more from them that they learn from us because they're just innovating all the time.