Reducing Food Waste: Jennifer Kaplan Of Miyoko’s Creamery On How They Are Helping To Eliminate Food Waste
An Interview With Martita Mestey
Don’t try to be something you’re not. There are worker bees, and there are leaders. Embrace your talents and surround yourself with others that complement you.
In many parts of the United States, there is a crisis of people having limited reliable access to a sufficient quantity of affordable, nutritious food. As prices rise, this problem will likely become more acute. How can this problem be solved? Who are the leaders helping to address this crisis?
In this interview series, we are talking to leaders who are helping to address the increasing problem of food insecurity who can share the initiatives they are leading to address and solve this problem.
As a part of this series, we had the pleasure of interviewing Jennifer Kaplan.
Jennifer Kaplan is a sustainable food systems evangelist. She is the Director of Sustainability for the vegan dairy producer, Miyoko’s Creamery. Jennifer is also the author of GREENING YOUR SMALL BUSINESS (Random House Penguin) a Small Business Trends’ Editor’s Choice Best SMB Book.
Thank you so much for doing this with us! Before we dig in, our readers would like to get to know you a bit more. Can you tell us a bit about your “backstory”? What led you to this particular career path?
I had a very circuitous route that took me from corporate marketing for media companies like Condé Nast and Lifetime Television to teaching to authoring a book on small business sustainability, to writing about sustainable food and wine to teaching about sustainable food and wine, and finally to Miyoko’s where I get to work on helping a CPG food company be a force for good. So it’s been a wild ride that landed me in my dream job.
Can you share the most interesting story that happened to you since you began your career?
Extraordinary leaders have supported me. Dr. Louise Marshall at Marymount University was the first — and most significant — of those people. Having never taught before, I applied to Marymount to teach marketing 101 to first-year students. However, at the interview, I was caught off-guard when she offered me an upper-level market research class to teach. When I declined, saying that I couldn’t do it, she explained why I could and should take the position. That market research class launched me into the world of sustainability. Without her support, I wouldn’t be here today.
Are you able to identify a “tipping point” in your career when you started to see success? Did you start doing anything different? Are there takeaways or lessons that others can learn from that?
There have been so many tipping points. Each time I think I’m stuck or dealing with an untenable situation, I look for another opportunity. My takeaway is to keep building on what you know and love — being a passionate, life-long learner will payout in the end.
None of us are able to achieve success without some help along the way. Is there a particular person to whom you are grateful who helped get you to where you are? Can you share a story about that?
See my answer about Dr. Louise Marshall above.
You are a successful leader. Which three character traits do you think were most instrumental to your success? Can you please share a story or example for each?
See above!
Can you please give us your favorite “Life Lesson Quote”? Can you share how that was relevant to you in your life?
“Resentment is like swallowing poison and expecting the other person to die.” There are so many personalities to contend with in the world, and sometimes conflict occurs. Grudges do no good whatsoever, and they benefit no one. So I try to see the best in everyone and give everyone the benefit of the doubt.
Ok super. Let’s now shift to the main part of our discussion. Can you describe to our readers how your work is helping to address the challenge of food insecurity?
As the sustainability manager at Miyoko’s Creamery, a vegan dairy producer, I know that food manufacturers need to step up and focus on solving food insecurity because who has more access to donatable food than food manufacturers? Today, food manufacturers contribute ~2% of food waste in the U.S., according to ReFED, a national nonprofit working to end food loss and waste across the U.S. food system. While that doesn’t sound like a lot, it represents billions of dollars in new, primarily edible food that can and should go to food insecure populations. Sadly, sending surplus food to a landfill is often less costly and less of a hassle than taking the time and resources necessary to divert it to food banks and other food rescue organizations. At Miyoko’s, we are committed to reducing food waste by making sure every cheese wheel and butter block we produce makes it into a meal, not a landfill.
For this reason, we have made food donations one of the pillars of our food waste reduction efforts and engaged Replate, a national food rescue nonprofit, as our lead partner. Last year, we donated more than 130 thousand pounds of food, representing 40M gallons of water saved, 110k meals served, and 268.7k pounds of CO2 diverted. When we fight the social ill of food insecurity, we also save precious environmental resources. It’s a win-win.
In your opinion, what should other business and civic leaders do to further address these problems? Can you please share a few things that can be done to further address the problem of food insecurity?
Again, as industry leaders, we cannot take the easy road. However, setting up food recovery systems is worth the trouble and marginal expense. In the end, it will likely save the company money because you eliminate the cost of disposal and take a write-off.
Are there other leaders or organizations who have done good work to address the challenge of food scarcity? Can you tell us what they have done? What specifically impresses you about their work? Perhaps we can reach out to them to include them in this series.
Replate has been our primary nonprofit food rescue partner, and under their management, I have seen firsthand the significant advances made to our food donation activities. They provide essential services, including transportation logistics, nonprofit outreach and coordination, and environmental and community impact metric computation. Replate is a respected leader in the field, employing highly competent operations experts and playing a central role as the single-stop resource for our business as we work to divert edible food from landfills. I love working with the team at Replate because they make my job easy, and they share our vision of achieving zero waste to landfill for edible food and ensuring that all edible food ends up in meals, not landfills.
If you had the power to influence legislation, are there laws that you would like to see introduced that might help you in your work?
We have excellent food recovery legislation in place. Nationally, the Bill Emerson Good Samaritan Food Donation Act requires States to adopt legislation to protect those who donate food in good faith from civil or criminal liability. That means any business that wants to donate food has federal and state-level protection. However, there is a lot of intentional and unintentional disregard for the legislation, and business owners have all sorts of reasons for not wanting to donate food. I would like to better educate food service workers and food manufacturers about those regulations. A food business should never tell an employee that they must discard food because of legal liability. It’s simply false.
What are your “5 things I wish someone told me when I first started” and why? Please share a story or example for each.
- Brains are not enough. I was raised to believe getting a good education and being intelligent and hardworking would lead me to success. It turns out these qualities are necessary but not sufficient.
- Improvement is far more challenging to achieve than building something better in the first place. If you don’t think change is difficult, then you haven’t asked anyone in your family to change seats at the dinner table.
- The world will change in ways you cannot imagine. Change is constant, and those who embrace it can do great things.
- Don’t try to be something you’re not. There are worker bees, and there are leaders. Embrace your talents and surround yourself with others that complement you.
- Cultivate grit. It’s been said that the most successful people are the ones that keep going when everyone else quits, carry on through the most demanding circumstances, and deliver results — persevering when others don’t is what sets you apart. Building grit and cultivating resilience sets you up for success.
You are a person of enormous influence. If you could inspire a movement that would bring the most amount of good to the most amount of people, what would that be? You never know what your idea can trigger. 🙂
As nerdy as this sounds, I would love to see a commitment to advanced recycling where consumers don’t have to sort their garbage. The technology exists, but the infrastructure doesn’t. If we can get the infrastructure in place, we can create a truly circular economy that doesn’t include plastic floating in our oceans and filling up our landfills.
Is there a person in the world or the U.S. with whom you would love to have a private breakfast or lunch, and why? He or she might just see this, especially if we tag them. 🙂
I quote Professor Andrew Hoffman from the University of Michigan all the time. He’s written extensively about the next phase of sustainability, and I’d love to get his take on the state of sustainability today.
How can our readers further follow your work online?
I’m on LinkedIn.
This was very meaningful, thank you so much, and we wish you only continued success.
Reducing Food Waste: Jennifer Kaplan Of Miyoko’s Creamery On How They Are Helping To Eliminate Food… was originally published in Authority Magazine on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.