Park City’s new Zero Food Waste Cohort offers economic and environmental wins for local restaurants

PARK CITY, Utah — The Park City Chamber & Visitors Bureau (PCCVB) and Park City Community Foundation (PCCF) have partnered to create a new initiative aimed at reducing food waste in local restaurants. The Zero Food Waste Restaurant Cohort will work with 20 local restaurants and caterers to implement waste reduction strategies at no cost to the businesses.

The pilot program offers participants coverage of start-up costs and monthly service fees for food waste diversion, a workshop led by industry experts from ReFED, follow-up consulting, and streamlined onboarding for the Green Business Program.

“This is a great opportunity for local restaurants to work alongside experts to find customized solutions that will help reduce waste and costs for their businesses,” said Morgan Mingle, Director of Sustainable Tourism for the PCCVB, who led the creation of this project.

Understanding the unique challenges of Park City’s diverse restaurant scene is central to the program’s approach. Mingle emphasized that flexibility is key to success.

“We’re all very aware that there’s not going to be one solution that all restaurants, all caterers, are going to have very different business models, operations, and capabilities,” she said. “By making this a cohort, and by focusing on some basics with the workshop, and then having a lot of one-on-one consultation specifically with those individual restaurants, it’ll help them have confidence in implementing these solutions in a way that’s going to work for their business.”

The program takes a comprehensive approach, addressing both prevention of food waste and effective disposal of what can’t be avoided. Beyond the environmental benefits, there’s a compelling financial case for restaurants to participate.

Andy Hecht, Climate Fund Manager at PCCF, points to the significant economic advantages of food waste diversion.

“It is amazing how much money it saves the county,” Hecht said. “You’re taking something that really is quite valuable, and you’re putting it in a valuable space forever, it’s not going to be reused. And you’re taking that valuable resource out, and you’re creating a marketable product. Economically it’s an amazing story to tell.”

By diverting food waste from taking up valuable landfill space and instead converting it into valuable soil through composting, the program transforms something that costs money to dispose of into a resource that can generate revenue.

This initiative represents a broader collaboration between key organizations working toward shared sustainability goals in Park City. Megan Fleming from the PCCF highlighted the importance of these partnerships.

“The Chamber has their Sustainable Tourism Plan. We have Zero Food Waste. The Green Business Program is trying to get the businesses on board,” Fleming said. “It’s just a really cool collaboration between all of these different programs and trying to really merge those all into something that we can all work together on.”

For participating restaurants, the program will connect them with expertise on inventory control and ordering practices to reduce upstream waste. When food waste is unavoidable, businesses will have connections to food donation organizations like Wasteless Solutions for ready-to-eat meals and the Christian Center for ingredient donations. Any remaining food waste will be composted locally rather than sent to the landfill.

The ongoing costs for restaurants are minimal according to Hecht. “Most residences and most businesses I’ve been working with thus far have all come back and said, ‘Wow, this is not expensive.’ The ongoing monthly charges for pickup are very, very minimal,” he noted about the composting service.

Looking to the future, the program’s organizers see this pilot as just the beginning of a larger transformation in how Park City handles food waste.

“I think our overall goal is to scale this county-wide,” Fleming said. “Our hope with this pilot is really to learn and to understand and work closely and figure out where we go from here.”

Interested restaurants and caterers can apply for the program before April 28, through the Park City Community Foundation website.