Dive Brief:

• Consumers often are known for their tastes as well as what they waste, but Hy-Ve stores in Nebraska are giving the lie to the notion that shopping and saving don’t mix. Begun at the Omaha Hy-Ve store, which was able to keep thousands of pounds of organic waste out of landfills per month, an effort to keep thousands of pounds of food per month out of landfills has been enlarged to include all 25 of the chain’s stores in Nebraska by May's close.
• The Omaha store began the program by taking unsold food from its produce aisle, organic waste from its salad bar, and other waste from its floral department and sending it all to a compost plant in Firth, NE. The compost created from that organic waste will return to the Hy-Ve stores to be sold as compost for shoppers and aid Hy-Vee gardens' soil in addition to community gardens the retailer backs.
• Expanding the program to all of the chain’s Nebraska stores has enabled Hy-Ve to begin a process of reforming the waste into compost, animal feed, and biogas, which the chain is accomplishing with the help of Sanimax.

Dive Insight:

Conservation can be good business, as Hy-Ve is demonstrating through its compost-creating effort. Simply tweaking its procedures to collect and reuse material will enable the company to keep a predicted 150,000 pounds of produce and organic waste out of landfills each month. Additionally, the firm has created from the waste a new product for consumers. The efforts fall in line with the USDA’s recently begun push to reduce organic waste.