The economics of food rescue: deriving the value of variable food donations

Abstract

The emergence of food rescues in recent decades has filled a need to divert food waste from the landfill and distribute it for human consumption. This study aims to assign a dollar value to a year's worth of captured food waste by one food rescue in Colorado. Economic valuation of food waste has mainly been done from the supermarket's perspective. Other analyses of the value of food rescues are derived from the social value the resource itself provides, rather than the specific valuation of the goods it captures. This research provides a new and preliminary method to standardize food dollars across donor source types to create an approximate dollar value for food intake records. One food rescue in Northern Colorado was able to save $5.8 million worth of food from the landfill over one year by working with a variety of partners across the state. This method may provide a new means for food rescues to assign value when drafting reports for various stakeholders, and it may also offer a means of value estimation for communities looking to start a food rescue.