Imagining a Denver without Food Waste

On a cloudy Tuesday morning in northeast Denver, volunteers with the group Hope House Colorado, which works to provide teen moms in need with vital resources, loaded up food from a warehouse into the group’s van. All of the food they were taking, which would go on to help people in need, was at one point intended to be thrown away.

“It’s such a huge problem, and it’s kinda a dumb problem when you think about it,” said Kyle Endres, CEO of We Don’t Waste, the company that provided Hope House Colorado, along with many other nonprofits, with their food. “We have all of these people who are suffering from food insecurity, and then we’re throwing away all this food. If you had nothing to eat, and you knew that people were throwing away food, that would probably be really disheartening for you.”

Upwards of 40 percent of the food that is purchased from grocery stores in America is ultimately thrown away. In 2019, the National Resources Defense Council estimated that the average Denver household throws away 4.2 pounds of food each week, 3.2 pounds of which are still theoretically edible. 

We Don’t Waste is a nonprofit focused on food rescue, retrieving food that other companies or groups would have otherwise thrown away, and redirecting it towards food banks and other ways of providing for food-insecure people. Initially founded in 2009, the nonprofit has continually grown over the years, now working out of a warehouse that helps to store food that would otherwise have been tossed. It also houses refrigerated trucks to help distribute the food to community partners.

“There’s unfortunately a lot of inefficiency built into our system,” Endres said. “We don’t have an exclusively regional system, so you have food being trucked across the country, and there’s always opportunity for errors with that, so it’s not a problem of how much food; there’s enough food out there for everyone. It’s a distribution challenge, and getting it where it needs to go.”

To alleviate the challenge, the nonprofit has partnered with different companies and other distributors who will provide them with any food that they are unable to keep, whether because of space or because it doesn’t meet their standards for being sold while still being good to eat. We Don’t Waste then houses in their storage facility before redistributing it out into the community. 

In 2024, the nonprofit rescued over 21 million servings of food, which were distributed to over 100 groups of partner food kitchens and other nonprofits they work with to redirect the rescued portions to food-insecure people. “We have been able to feed millions of people over the course of our existence,” Endres said. “But I think what’s important is it’s in partnership with all these organizations. We’re not doing it alone.”

While these methods help to mitigate any food that might be thrown out on the production and distribution end, a significant amount of waste also stems from residential waste. To address this, We Don’t Waste also has education outreach programs, which provide teaching on the impact of food waste and different steps that can be taken on the individual level to mitigate one’s own discarded food.

“If you understand the resources that it takes to grow food, if you understand how much water, labor, land it takes, you might be less likely to waste it,” Endres said.

Food waste contributes to adverse effects on the environment, notably exacerbating the process of climate change.

“Food waste is a huge contributor to greenhouse gases,” Endres said. “It produces methane, which is ten times more potent than carbon dioxide.” 

A significant portion of food waste in the country is generated from restaurants, with about 15 percent of food that ends up in landfills coming from restaurants, according to NPR. Countering this mindset and helping to provide a precedent for how restaurants can limit or even eliminate food waste was part of the motivation that led to the creation of Sullivan Scrap Kitchen, a Denver restaurant that describes itself as a “zero waste kitchen,” meaning any ingredients it purchases are used in their entirety, without anything going to waste.

“It comes from the need to just buy, buy, buy,” said Terrence Rogers, owner of Sullivan Scrap Kitchen. “We’re tricked into buying more than we need, more frequently than we need. And we’re tricked into this false sense of scarcity.”

The idea for a zero-waste kitchen came through Rogers’ work with his catering company, TBD Foods, which often required making very specific dishes for catered events that left his team with spare ingredients that they didn’t know what to do with.

“We found that people in catering want very specific dishes,” Rogers said. “And you inevitably end up with waste.”

They implemented a sandwich pop-up once a week, with menu items built around whatever leftover ingredients they had.

“The trim from the steaks we didn’t utilize, we’d grind into meat. Some extra vegetables that didn’t get processed, we’d turn into a little sandwich or salad. Herbs that were going bad could become the sauce,” Rogers said. “We were always trying to incorporate things that would have been wasted from not being used, and that eventually developed into our restaurant.”

The small pop-up would develop into a full-fledged restaurant in 2020, keeping the same philosophy in mind: that it was possible to avoid wasting parts of ingredients with conscious planning and effort to include them.

“You get a little bit of everything; we get a lot of people who are really excited and are interested in what we’re doing and ask about how we do things and where we get stuff, and you get some people who aren’t really interested and just want a quality meal,” Rogers said.

Another local business, Reem’s Bakery, which specializes in Syrian desserts, has offered its leftover food at a discounted rate at the end of the day, allowing people to take a random assortment of food that would otherwise go stale or be thrown out. The sales are facilitated through the app TooGoodToGo, which specializes in these sorts of end-of-day discounted sales and is used by many other Denver restaurants and shops.

“It helps people who want to try our food,” said Bouchra Benlaghid, owner of Reem’s. “We’ve had people come in just because of the app and become customers.”

We Don’t Waste has recently begun trying to expand their efforts, moving into a larger location that has a kitchen, which they hope can be used to teach people skills to make sustainable food at home, as well as a classroom to continue their education efforts. They also recently launched the We Rescue app, which allows individuals throughout the city to contribute by collecting and donating food that the group isn’t able to reach.

“Really, our goal is to have no food go to waste in Denver,” Endres said. “So if we can get closer to that, that’s great.”

Work is being done on several fronts to help mitigate food waste in Denver and provide an alternative mindset that can prove to be a more sustainable path forward.

“I think another aspect of [food waste] is just the way America sees food,” Endres said. “There has to be plenty of it, it has to be perfect and that creates a lot of opportunities for waste when you have the imperfect bell pepper or the imperfect apple. We’re used to going into the supermarket and seeing perfect produce, so the food system doesn’t accept imperfect products because they know most people won’t buy them. There are a lot of challenges there, but it also provides an opportunity for food rescue organizations like us to be able to provide food access to people who maybe don’t have it.”