Beyond the Summit: Building the Systems To Reduce Food Waste

ReFED hosts its annual Food Waste Solutions Summit to convene practitioners from across the food community under our “big tent” to advance our vision of a sustainable, resilient, and inclusive food system that makes the best use of the food we grow. This article series is designed to keep conversations from the Summit going throughout the year by revisiting some of the key themes and takeaways shared during the event. This year’s Summit will be held May 19-21, in Charlotte, North Carolina. To learn more and register, visit summit.refed.org.

ReFED estimates that 70 million tons of surplus food—food that goes unsold or uneaten—is generated in the U.S. every year, representing lost value for businesses and missed opportunities to feed people. At the 2025 ReFED Food Waste Solutions Summit in Seattle, one mainstage session in particular brought this reality into sharp, hands-on focus. In a live “Bin Dig” demonstration on stage, Ben Kuethe Oaks, Senior Vice President at Divert, and Suzanne Long, former Chief Sustainability and Transformation Officer at Albertsons Companies and current Founder and CEO of Fauxliage, sorted through a bin of unsold food, categorizing each item as “sell,” “donate,” “divert,” or “trash.” The exercise highlighted a critical insight: food waste is not a single, uniform stream, but a complex mix of products, packaging, and circumstances, each with different drivers and different potential solutions.

As ReFED celebrates ten years since its founding, we have been reflecting on how the food waste movement has made significant progress in building awareness, quantifying the problem, and identifying solutions. Today, the field has entered a new phase. The question is no longer just what food waste is or why it matters, it is how to design systems that can address it every day, at scale.

To explore how this shift is playing out in practice, we spoke with Ben, whose work at Divert focuses on helping food manufacturers, distributors, and retailers operationalize food waste reduction across prevention, recovery, and energy conversion pathways. From this conversation, three key themes emerged for building the systems behind food waste reduction.

1. Food waste has moved from a values conversation to an operations conversation.

A decade ago, food waste reduction efforts were often led by sustainability or corporate affairs teams, driven by environmental and social goals. Today, that responsibility is increasingly embedded within core business functions—from store-level operations to executive leadership. Most significantly, rather than surplus food being viewed simply as “waste,” businesses are shifting their approach to treating it as an opportunity to create business impact — as put on display by the Bin Dig exercise.

“We’ve shifted from a values conversation to an operations conversation,” explains Oaks. “Sustainability and corporate affairs used to own a lot of these food waste programs, pilots, and exploratory work, but now that work is embedded in companies’ profit and loss statements.”

This shift has important implications for how solutions are designed and implemented. Sustainability still helps motivate action, but it is rarely the sole driver. Instead, as businesses have developed a clearer understanding of the financial implications of food waste, the issue has become more tightly connected to profit and loss, labor efficiency, and day-to-day performance metrics.

Another part of this shift is how businesses are beginning to view surplus food itself. Rather than treating it simply as waste to be disposed of, there is a growing recognition that it represents a form of lost value—whether through associated production costs, recoverable nutrients, energy, or operations insights. As Oaks explains Divert’s work, “We’re capturing the nutrient value, the carbon and energy value, and the insights from unsold food, which then feeds back upstream to help improve production, ordering, and inventory management.”

Oaks emphasizes that, for food waste reduction to be durable, it must align with how businesses already operate. If solutions are perceived as an additional burden—another vendor, another process, another drain on time—they are unlikely to stick. Increasingly, food waste solutions are becoming embedded into existing workflows and tied to core business priorities, in turn becoming part of how the whole system functions.

2. Food waste is not one problem—it is a system of different problems.

One of the clearest takeaways from both the Bin Dig exercise and Oaks’ perspective is that food waste is highly variable.

“Unsold food and organic waste across the food supply chain is highly variable. It’s not uniform,” he notes. “This relates to seasonality, geography, the complexity of the operation, and the dynamic decision making of merchandisers and consumers.”

The big takeaway is that surplus food results from a wide range of factors, including overordering, merchandising mismatches, spoilage, recalls, or equipment failures. Consequently, each of these drivers requires a different response. Prevention strategies may address ordering and forecasting issues, while donation and recovery can redirect edible surplus, and conversion pathways can process non-consumable material.

This variability underscores the limitations of one-size-fits-all solutions. Addressing food waste cannot rely on a single intervention—whether that is donation, composting, or prevention alone. Instead, it requires a “systems-level, embedded” approach that reflects the complexity and “fragmentation” of how food moves through the supply chain.

Oaks also emphasizes that while prevention remains the most impactful strategy in the food recovery hierarchy, it does not eliminate the need for downstream infrastructure. “Waste isn’t a category, it’s material in transition,” he explains. Recognizing that distinction allows businesses to design systems that manage surplus more effectively across multiple pathways, rather than treating it as a single problem to be solved at the end.

3. Data and infrastructure are key to turning circularity into daily practice.

As the conversation around food waste has evolved, so too has the role of data and infrastructure. According to Oaks, operationalizing a circular food system depends first on building systems that work in real-world environments.

“You’ve got to have the data, infrastructure, and system set up as the base,” he says. “Scalable infrastructure that generates data at a more granular level can empower companies with actionable insights into where, why, and how the waste is happening.”

Once that operational foundation is in place, data becomes a powerful tool for continuous improvement. “Data is moving retailers, manufacturers, and distributors from hindsight to foresight,” Oaks explains. Historically, businesses relied on periodic reporting, such as monthly shrink data or disposal costs, which provided limited visibility into the underlying drivers of waste.

Today, more granular data allows businesses to better understand where and why waste occurs, and to connect upstream decisions—such as ordering, promotions, and product assortment—to downstream outcomes. This enables more proactive decision-making and more informed trade-offs, helping businesses reduce waste while maintaining performance.

Ultimately, the combination of infrastructure and data is what allows circularity to move from aspiration to execution. As Oaks puts it, “We’re building the foundation so they can do this every day.”

Building a circular food system in practice

Taken together, these insights point toward a vision of a more circular food system—one where surplus is minimized, and when it does occur, it is managed in ways that maximize value.

In practice, this means more closely aligning supply and demand to prevent excess, while ensuring that edible food is redirected to feed people and non-consumable material is processed to recover energy and nutrients. It also requires systems that are economically aligned, so that food waste reduction is not treated as a side initiative, but as an integrated part of how businesses operate.

The shift from awareness to action is already underway. But as this conversation makes clear, the future of food waste reduction will depend on whether these systems can be designed to function consistently at scale.

Circularity, as Oaks notes, “is aspirational until it’s operational.”

You can watch the full recording of the Summit “Bin Dig” session below. To stay up-to-date on all of the latest ReFED Food Waste Solutions Summit news, sign up for our mailing list.