2023 Food Waste Solutions Summit

May 16-18, 2023 | St.Louis, MO

Ben Kuethe

Vice President of Customer Solutions & Success

Divert Inc.

Bio:

Ben Kuethe is the Vice President of Customer Solutions & Success at Divert Inc., an impact technology company on a mission to Protect the Value of Food™. Ben joined Divert in 2016 and has played an instrumental role in helping to build and scale Divert's business. Specifically, over the past four years, he has built out the Solutions and Success team, working with Divert's retail grocery customers to set a new standard for how wasted food is measured, mitigated and managed. Currently serving over 5,400 retail grocery locations and growing, Divert is setting the foundation to feed more people and decarbonize the food supply chain at scale.

Prior to Divert, Ben worked at Casella, working on some of the first commercial food waste diversion and anaerobic digestion projects in the Northeast. He has also held advisory and leadership positions with Slow Food Seacoast, supporting and advocating for the food producers and purveyors of his community in Seacoast Maine, and is an entrepreneurial mentor for MIT Solve. Ben grew up around dairy farms in Wisconsin, and spent his formative years in Pittsburgh, PA where he received a BS in Chemical Engineering from the University of Pittsburgh. His appreciation and love for food and the environment transcends outside of his professional world, where he enjoys cooking, traveling and camping with his partner, Kelly, and their two dogs, Mo & Doc.

Schedule

Wednesday, May 17th

11:00am - 12:00pm


From Garbage to Gold: Uncovering the Value of Recycling, Composting, and Anaerobic Digestion

Breakout Session (Running Concurrently)

Nearly 70% of surplus food is treated as true “waste,” meaning it is either left in the fields after harvest, incinerated, dumped, deposited in the sewer, sent to landfill, or applied to the land. But much of this could have been used for other purposes — in fact, recycling and composting offer one of the largest opportunities for decreasing the amount of waste in our food system. What can be done to ensure we’re finding the highest and best use for any food or scraps that remain? While there are many sites today in the U.S. that utilize anaerobic digesters, very few are dedicated to processing food scraps. This session will dig up the value of composting and anaerobic digestion, unveil the adoption of these solutions, and bring to the surface the infrastructure gaps that hinder these efforts.

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