USDA encourages food waste entrepreneurs to exhibit at the Food Waste Innovation Zone during the Global Sustainability Summit in Denver, Colorado. Dr. Catherine Woteki, USDA Undersecretary for Research, Education and Economics will help kick off the Global Sustainability Summit in Denver, Colorado. Organized by the Food Marketing Institute and Grocery Manufacturers Association, the Summit runs from August 19-21, 2015.
The Summit will put the spotlight on food waste innovators, and USDA invites you to come showcase your innovation and meet fellow innovators, food-waste reduction advocates and senior-level executives from the nation’s leading food retailers and manufacturers. You will also have a chance to compete in the Global Sustainability Summit Food Waste Start-Up Challenge event.
Across the country, producers, businesses, and entrepreneurs are innovating to develop new technologies and systems for reducing, recovering or recycling food waste. These new innovations—which range from food-donation routing systems, chic composting bins for restaurants, pallet systems for food banks, new technologies for small-scale food processing, and compact anaerobic digesters—are helping to efficiently reduce food loss and waste and, in many cases, put food on the table for families in need.
Dr. Woteki and I are both looking forward to attending the Global Sustainability Summit and meeting private-sector food waste entrepreneurs with cutting edge food waste innovations. We will also share some of the USDA’s innovative research to reduce food loss and waste. Through its research agencies, USDA invests in research on new technologies for reducing spoilage of fresh foods and on new products from agricultural by-products and waste materials. By increasing the feasibility or reducing the cost of better food loss and waste management, innovation helps to make reducing, recovering and recycling food waste economically viable for businesses, organizations and households.
