2022 Food Waste Solutions Summit

Ten years ago, ReFED’s Roadmap to Reduce U.S. Food Waste set an ambitious vision for transforming the way America produces, manages, and thinks about food waste. Since then, the field has continued to grow, solutions have scaled, and momentum has built in ways both measurable and inspiring. But with urgency still high and much work remaining, this opening session is as much about what comes next as it is about how far we’ve come. Our emcee Chef Joel Gamoran and ReFED’s Sara Burnett will kick off our programming by welcoming you to Charlotte. ReFED President Dana Gunders will set the stage with a look at the field’s most meaningful accomplishments from the past year—including the reveal of a brand new video featuring voices from around the country highlighting their work—as well as the bright spots on the horizon in the year ahead. And the session will also feature a unique “kitchen table” discussion about the new landscape of food as a result of policy and other macro cultural influences, featuring Michiel Bakker of the Culinary Institute of America, Emily Broad Lieb from the Harvard Law School Food Law and Policy Clinic, and chef Michel Nischan, and moderated by Kim Severson of the New York Times.

Welcome to North Carolina, a state with a food story that is richer, more complex, and instructive than most. This session uses North Carolina as a lens through which to examine food waste from angles that rarely share the same stage: we’ll share research on household food waste patterns across the state; shine a spotlight on Black farmers and cultural foodways and the role of heritage and community food traditions in shaping the broader food system; and host a conversation about how new policies ripple through food culture—and how food culture, in turn, shapes what becomes politically possible. From farm to kitchen to community table, North Carolina offers a vivid illustration of how place-based knowledge, cultural identity, and policy momentum can reinforce or undermine one another—and how you can move the needle when you take the whole picture into account.

Also during this mainstage session, we’ll introduce a panel of founders/CEOs to the stage who will share candid reflections on what it took to grow their solutions from early-stage ideas into mainstream impact—offering hard-won lessons on how innovation and investment align for success.

Manufacturing is one of the largest blind spots in food waste research—poorly understood and quantified, yet responsible for substantial losses and cascading effects across the supply chain. But that's changing. Over the past year, LIDD partnered with ReFED on a first-of-its-kind research effort to quantify and characterize food waste across diverse manufacturing settings and food types—findings that will power critical updates to ReFED's Insights Engine and its ongoing analyses. This session's panelists will explore what that data reveals: which solutions are most promising in manufacturing and what it takes to act on them. Speakers will zero in on two high-opportunity approaches—modified atmosphere packaging (MAP) and upcycling—examining their potential to prevent and divert significant volumes of waste while generating benefits that ripple across the supply chain. The session will be a case study in what's possible when rigorous research and cross-sector collaboration point the way toward solutions that are actionable and built to scale.