Reducing Food Waste: Sara Draper-Zivetz Of The SF Market On How They Are Helping To Eliminate Food Waste
An Interview With Martita Mestey
You’ll be surprised who you can get excited about or fired up about tackling food waste. Unlike other issues or causes, food waste isn’t hard to understand or connect with — it is something that most of us interact with on a daily basis. This is an opportunity for our work and we need to harness it.
It has been estimated that each year, more than 100 billion pounds of food is wasted in the United States. That equates to more than $160 billion worth of food thrown away each year. At the same time, in many parts of the United States, there is a crisis caused by people having limited access to healthy & affordable food options. The waste of food is not only a waste of money and bad for the environment, but it is also making vulnerable populations even more vulnerable.
Authority Magazine started a new series called “How Restaurants, Grocery Stores, Supermarkets, Hospitality Companies and Food Companies Are Helping To Eliminate Food Waste.” In this interview series, we are talking to leaders and principals of Restaurants, Grocery Stores, Supermarkets, Hospitality Companies, Food Companies, and any business or nonprofit that is helping to eliminate food waste, about the initiatives they are taking to eliminate or reduce food waste.
As a part of this series, I had the pleasure of interviewing Sara Draper-Zivetz.
Sara Draper-Zivetz is a nonprofit and social enterprise strategist with over a decade of experience in urban food systems and community development. She holds a master’s degree in City & Regional Planning from UC Berkeley, and an undergraduate degree in Sociology from Barnard College. Outside of her role as Program Manager for The SF Market, Sara serves as a Board Member for City Slicker Farms, is a member of the 2022 Wallace Center Food Systems Leadership Network, and lives with her partner and two cats in Oakland, CA.
Thank you so much for joining us in this interview series! Before we dive in, our readers would love to “get to know you” a bit better. Can you tell us a story about what brought you to this specific career path?
Growing up internationally in South East Asia, I learned from an early age how universally powerful food is as a connector across cultural lines. I also saw how precious and scarce a good meal could be for so many, and how diligently cooks around the world work to stretch ingredients and save scraps to ensure no food gets wasted. It was in this context that I first became passionate about food waste. When I moved to the United States and learned that almost half of our food ends up generating emissions in landfills instead of getting eaten, I knew this was a problem I wanted to help solve.
Can you share the most interesting story that happened to you since you began at your company or organization?
A few months ago, our team had the chance to meet with a gentleman who was a beneficiary of The SF Market’s Food Recovery program. He was formerly incarcerated and part of a culinary job training program to help him get back on his feet. We met him in the kitchen where he is training, and he had prepared a jar of pasta sauce to share with us. As he presented me with a spoonful, he explained that he had used tomatoes we donated to make the marinara sauce. The sauce was spicy, complex, with deep flavor, and as he described the production process in detail, he beamed with pride. It reinforced for me the powerful and incredibly diverse role of food in people’s lives, beyond just meeting basic needs. And recognizing that our programs addressing food waste are contributing to more than just hunger was a powerful moment for me.
Can you share a story about the funniest mistake you made when you were first starting? Can you tell us what lesson you learned from that?
On my way to my job interview at the SF Market, I couldn’t decide whether to wear formal shoes or something more practical like my sneakers. I knew the Market was an industrial campus, but I had never been on site before, and wasn’t sure what kind of impression sneakers would make for a Program Manager job interview. I pulled up to the parking lot and saw the loading docks and semi-trucks and fork lifts and suddenly my high heels looked ridiculous. I was relieved to have brought options, and opted for sneakers! Though a funny memory, it was also a reminder that so much of our food system is a result of hard, physical work in sometimes unglamorous environments. It takes a huge range of people and jobs, from farmers to truck drivers, salespeople to logistics experts, to keep it running, and not all of that is visible to the public eye. When we talk about making change in the food system, we have to remember that much of it won’t happen at desks and in board rooms.
How do you define “Leadership”? Can you explain what you mean or give an example?
To me, leadership is about balancing confidence and humility, recognizing that you are in a position of power and have the opportunity to make a difference, but also that you don’t know all the answers and sharing in the process of decision-making with others is itself a powerful way to lead. Things are rarely better by going alone, so I define leadership as bringing in the best thought partners and collaborators, and finding ways to share power.
Can you please give us your favorite “Life Lesson Quote”? Can you share how that was relevant to you in your life?
“Mighty oaks hide in tiny seeds.” I love this quote for many reasons, but it has been a constant in my life because it reminds me that everything big that has ever happened started out with something small. It is a quote that is at once a source of inspiration for trying new things, encouragement when the going gets tough, and patience when progress is slow.
Now for the main focus of the interview- this includes 9 additional questions, including a 5-part question.
Let’s begin with a basic definition of terms so that all of us are on the same page. What exactly are we talking about when we refer to food waste?
Technical definitions differ (food waste is sometimes referred to as a subcategory of “food loss” and pertains just to the edible food that is disposed of from supermarkets, restaurants, institutions, and households, rather than further upstream on farms and during distribution) but for this conversation, food waste refers to any edible food that goes uneaten and thrown out.
Can you help articulate a few of the main causes of food waste?
As implied above, food waste can happen — and be prevented! — at every part of the food system, from farm to fork, and at each of these points, the causes are varied. At the household level, it can be difficult to plan for, purchase, and consume perishable foods before the end of their edible shelf life. There is a lot of misunderstanding about food labels, leading people to also throw food out before its true expiration. For institutions that help connect farms and forks, like ours at The SF Market, variability in the market can cause food waste: when a distributor anticipates a certain amount of demand for a product, but in reality, that demand is lower, there is an excess of product with no buyer available before it goes to waste. That’s where programs like our Food Recovery program come in.
What are a few of the obstacles that companies and organizations face when it comes to distributing extra or excess food? What can be done to overcome those barriers?
Especially when it comes to produce (our main focus at The SF Market), perishability is a big issue. We have a short window between when we receive surplus food donations and when we can get them into the hands and mouths of our community. Infrastructure that can help extend the shelf life (like refrigeration), and more opportunities to process fresh produce into longer-lasting items (e.g. partnering with organizations that have facilities and staff to make freezable meals out of our produce) can help. Another obstacle is capacity. The organizations we work with to distribute food to food insecure individuals) are exceptionally talented and dedicated, but as nonprofit organizations they, like us, have to do their work on very tight budgets with limited capacity. More resources to help staff these organizations with the people needed to retrieve, process and redistribute food would go a long way to ensuring excess produce finds its way to a neighbor in need before it has to be thrown out. We also need ways to optimize these partnerships so that the organizations helping to distribute excess food aren’t traveling long distances to recover it. In the San Francisco Bay Area, there are hundreds of donating entities all over the region, but sometimes the organization who receives their donations has to drive dozens of miles to retrieve the donation and redistribute it. Building sufficient capacity and a strong network of donating and receiving partners that are geographically distributed across the region would help reduce the time and greenhouse gas emissions required to recover and redistribute excess food.
Can you describe a few of the ways that you or your organization are helping to reduce food waste?
As a wholesale produce market, The SF Market is home to 26 independent merchants who each move hundreds of thousands of pounds of fresh produce throughout the Bay Area daily. Since 2016, we have worked with our merchants to recover those produce items that they aren’t able to sell, and to date have distributed almost six million pounds of donated fruits, vegetables and other food to food insecure populations around the region. Each morning at six am, our food recovery program coordinator Carolyn Lasar, who has been with us since the beginning, reaches out to the merchants to find out what they have to donate, and then relays this information to our community partners. She ensures the produce is in good condition, and then our community partners pick up the recovered produce later that same morning. They then redistribute these items in free and fresh grocery bags or repurpose them into free and nutritious meals to their clients, who include seniors, low-income families, people with disabilities and others experiencing food insecurity.
Beyond operating this program, we also work with the region’s civic and public sector leadership to design and support implementation of other programs and policies that help to incentivize food recovery and/or disincentivize food waste across institutions, so that we might effect more systemic change in this issue.
Are there three things the community/society/politicians can do to help address the root of this problem?
- In California, a recently implemented law — Senate Bill 1383 — is a great example of legislation intended to promote food waste reduction by institutions. Legislation like this can have a particularly powerful impact at the state level, but city and county policymakers can also do really innovative things that help simultaneously tackle hunger and address the significant climate impacts of the food sector.
- Support community-based organizations and social entrepreneurs working on this issue. Because the causes for food waste are varied, the solutions are also varied; no one size fits all solution will address root causes, but a robust ecosystem of organizations and entrepreneurs — ideally working within the food industry at the grassroots level — can weave together a network of effective and creative solutions and interventions.
- We also need to continue to educate consumers about how they can use food to its maximum shelf life, including preserving and cooking fresh foods to make it possible to store them over time. This is a knowledge and skill set that has actually decreased over time among the general population, but could be a valuable tool in the fight against food waste.
What are your “5 things I wish someone told me when I first started” and why. Please share a story or example for each.
- You’ll be surprised who you can get excited about or fired up about tackling food waste. Unlike other issues or causes, food waste isn’t hard to understand or connect with — it is something that most of us interact with on a daily basis. This is an opportunity for our work and we need to harness it.
- Expertise isn’t just about facts and figures, and it takes time. That said, even decades in a field such as food waste won’t mean you know everything: there is always something to learn.
- Relationships are more important than almost anything else. So much of the success of our program is dependent on the relationships that our food recovery team, and especially food recovery coordinator, have built and nurtured with our merchants, community partners, funders, and others.
- There are a lot of different kinds of people working in the food waste space, including plenty of entrepreneurs who are pursuing a business opportunity. As a nonprofit social entrepreneur, it is important to figure out how to build a network among these diverse actors so we can all learn from each other, while recognizing we have different contributions to make to the issue.
- We aren’t going to fix food waste with shame and blame. It is often a product of poorly designed or incentivized systems, and we need to focus on the system, not the actors.
Are there other leaders or organizations who have done good work to address food waste? 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.
We collaborate with a wide range of organizations in the Bay Area (and some that work statewide and nationally) that are working together to address Food Waste. A few we can recommend: the San Francisco Department of Environment’s Zero Waste program is a public sector agency is championing very forward food waste policies and programming. Food Shift is an organization based in Alameda pairing workforce development initiatives with food waste reduction in very creative ways. Farming Hope recovers food and converts it into meals for food insecure San Franciscans, while also providing culinary job training for formerly incarcerated individuals. And finally, Berkeley Food Network is doing excellent food recovery work across the region, sourcing from a range of donating organizations to tackle food insecurity in Berkeley and beyond.
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. 🙂
I would ensure every neighborhood in the world had a well-resourced and well-managed community garden. The benefits of this kind of community asset are numerous: public access to green space, the opportunity to learn how to and have the satisfaction of growing your own food, be in community with your neighbors, and eating local fresh fruits, vegetables and herbs.
Is there a person in the world, or in the US 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 would love to have breakfast with Betty Reid Soskin. She is 100 years old and just retired from an incredible career (which she began in her 70s) with the National Park Service. I have watched interviews with her and she has the most fascinating stories and perspective on American history over the last century.
How can our readers further follow you or your company’s work online? (published articles, website, LinkedIn, Twitter, Instagram)
Website: https://thesfmarket.org/
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/san-francisco-wholesale-produce-market
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/thesfmarket
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/thesfmarket/
Twitter: https://twitter.com/thesfmarket
This was very meaningful, thank you so much, and we wish you only continued success.
Reducing Food Waste: Sara Draper-Zivetz Of The SF Market 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.