Food donation isn’t exactly the most lucrative business. Olio, a food rescue startup that allows neighbors to share surplus food via the company’s app, knows this only too well. "Right now, if we keep going as we are, Olio is going to die," said Anne-Charlotte Mornington, the startup’s head of impact.
Olio isn’t financially sustainable and has relied on venture capital investments to continue operating and providing its service. But Mornington knows this isn’t a long-term solution, so she and her colleagues have been on a quest to explore financial alternatives.
One of her big hopes is generating carbon credits (and the corresponding payments) for the embedded emissions in the food Olio diverts from landfills. "Carbon credits are good for addressing market failures and food waste is one of those," Mornington told me. That’s why she’s been collaborating with Verra, a non-profit that sets and verifies carbon credit standards, over the past 18 months to develop a new methodology for food waste carbon credits.
Verra plans to publish its methodology later this month — and Olio hopes to be the first project to go through the verification process to generate credits. But Olio isn’t the only food rescue organization struggling to make ends meet. Elizabeth Guinessey, Verra’s food and blue carbon innovation manager, spearheads the methodology and said she’s receiving weekly inquiries from other food rescuers anxiously awaiting its launch.
Leaving a precarious world behind
Why are food rescue nonprofits and businesses so excited about this new opportunity? Saving food from being wasted in supermarkets, restaurants, homes and other places by donating it to people in need is one of the few unmistakably good things most people in the food systems community can get behind.
Yet despite their clear social and environmental services, public and private funding is too scarce for capital-intensive food rescue operations — many of which require expensive assets such as trucks, warehouses and cold storage facilities to move food around and preserve it.
Once the food is eaten, it’s usually the end of the story, unlike nature-based offset projects that have a risk of reversal.
Eva Goulbourne, a food waste expert, told me they operate in an "unbelievably precarious world" without sustainable financial streams and spend too much time fundraising. The food waste nonprofit ReFED estimated that in the U.S. alone, making headway on food rescue will require $1.5 billion of additional funding to what’s available today through grants, tax benefits and impact investments. This additional funding would achieve a reduction of 7.8 million metric tons of CO2 equivalents or the emissions generated from the energy used in nearly a million homes for a year, according to my calculations.
Given this considerable carbon reduction potential and buzzing interest in carbon markets, it’s understandable that food rescue groups are keen to get a slice of the pie. Dana Gunders, executive director of ReFED, sees this as an exciting moment that will provide "a new level of validation to the climate benefits of food waste reduction."
A doable data challenge, but who qualifies?
Compared to other forms of carbon credit generation, the food rescue pathway seems relatively straightforward — Guinessey’s food waste methodology will have about 40 pages. In contrast, her work on blue carbon stretches over more than 200.
Overall, it’s a less complex endeavor than estimating carbon sequestered on a farm or in an ocean-based project. For example, a project would demonstrate that surplus food was collected from a supermarket and donated to a community in need and calculate the emissions avoided by not adding those products to a landfill. The potential risk of the food being thrown away rather than eaten by the recipients, alongside other ty
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