Executive Summary
Lexie Fields-Austin
April 25, 2019
Engaging with Food Recovery at Devour Culinary Classic
Local First Arizona
The American food system creates a significant amount of waste and relies on significant
energy, land, and freshwater inputs, accounting for a large amount of the United States GHG
emissions. Across the supply chain, a total of 40-50% of all food is not consumed. Reducing
food waste is a way to decrease the impacts of the food system across the supply chain. At
present, restaurants do not know of options available to them to mitigate their food waste and
decrease their impact on climate change. For this project I partnered with Local First Arizona to
use food recovery, or donating unused food to organizations that serve food insecure people, as
an attempt to close the loop between the food that is being wasted and those who struggle to
meet their caloric needs.
Devour Culinary Classic (DCC) is an annual weekend long food festival in Phoenix, AZ,
taking place each February. Local First Arizona organizes the “Towards Zero Waste” efforts for
the event. Their Green Team is in charge of all waste management including composting,
recycling, and back of house waste sorting. In order to increase waste diversion rates, Local First
Arizona was interested in adding food recovery into their Towards Zero Waste efforts. This
would allow usable leftover food to be donated instead of being composted or thrown out.
For this project I acted as one of Local First Arizona’s project leads and organized the
food recovery effort that took place at DCC. Using lessons learned from subject matter experts
and existing project management knowledge, I crafted a plan to educate restaurants about food
recovery at the beginning of the event and collect food to donate at the end of the event.
The restaurants at received information about food donation and were prompted to donate
at the end of the event. In total, 24 restaurants donated food, diverting 500 pounds of food, or 7%
of all diverted waste, from the event’s waste stream. Donations were given to refugees recently
released from ICE custody through a partnership with Arizona Jews for Justice. Following the
event, recommendations on how to improve the project in future years were given to Local First
Arizona in the categories of organization & logistics, marketing, communication, financial, and
sustainability.
A diffusion of innovation framework was used to identify the barriers faced by
restaurants and analyzed how food festivals are a way to overcome those barriers. Barriers that
were identified included a lack of education about food recovery and how it can be applied to
restaurants and lack of knowledge about the restaurant’s liability or lack thereof when donating
food. The food festival was used as an opportunity to educate restaurants in an attempt to
overcome those barriers through direct communication. Future research and projects can find a
way to integrate all of these barriers, using festivals as an entry point to follow up with

restaurants and work with them directly to overcome additional barriers as they present
themselves.