At Manayunk’s Crust Vegan Bakery this past May, PB&J scone season was giving way to jasmine peach scone season. Midseason, the dough invariably left over when a batch of scones is rolled and cut is incorporated into the next batch. “But at the end of the season, there’s no next batch,” Crust owner Meagan Benz says, recalling what she did with that last bit of strawberry-peanut butter dough. “I just rolled it out and made very tiny scones out of it.”
It’s that kind of thinking that — spoiler alert! — snagged Crust top honors in the Sustainable Business Network of Greater Philadelphia’s (SBN) inaugural Food Saver Challenge.
In the autumn of 2023 — aka pumpkin spice scone season — Benz applied to participate in the challenge, designed to support area food businesses in their efforts to reduce food waste and empower them to spur progress toward Philadelphia’s goal of diverting 90% or more of the City’s waste from landfills by 2035.
“I was hopeful that I could learn some new ideas,” says Benz of her interest in the challenge, “that it would force me to be a bit more in touch with our waste.” Along with providing tasty vegan sweets to customers and a living wage to staff, reducing waste has long been a Crust priority. “I wanted to get better at what’s already important to us.”
The Food Saver Challenge ran from October 2023 through March 2024, with Crust and eight other businesses — Philly Foodworks, Philadelphia Catering Company, Bar Hygge, Old City Coffee, LUHV Food, High Fidelity Bakery, Mariposa Food Co-op and Reading Terminal Market — accruing points according to the Environmental Protection Agency’s Wasted Food Scale. The scale tiers pathways for preventing or managing food waste according to their benefit to the environment and a circular economy.
Prevention of food waste — producing, buying or serving only what is needed — earned participants the most points; waste reduction methods such as repurposing and donation garnered fewer points; and composting netted the fewest. Businesses submitted waste data to SBN monthly.
While each challenge participant implemented food-saving strategies suited to individual business priorities and on-the-ground realities, SBN’s August 2024 Food Saver Challenge Report identified four key methods (useful for households too!) for effectively mitigating food waste: shifting purchasing or production patterns, food repurposing, food redistribution and composting.
Composting was established practice at SBN member Crust long before the Food Saver Challenge — the bakery has been a Bennett Compost customer since 2018 — so Benz didn’t need to make any adjustments on that front as she began digging into the numbers last fall, looking for ways to cut waste. Her data analysis did reveal actionable fluctuation in the demand for certain products at Crust’s Main Street storefront. “I realized that we need to be baking less cookies a day in the winter,” Benz says, reporting that the insight prompted her to revise instructions to staff. “‘Going forward we’re going to do half dozens. Don’t bake more until we sell out of a flavor.’”
Of course even a mindful, well-instructed staff will overbake a batch of cookies on occasion, or pull a tray of brownies before they’re quite done. Which is where what SBN executive director Devi Ramkissoon called Crust’s “unique repurposing solutions” come in. Throughout the challenge, “leftover ingredients were used whenever possible to prevent any edible food from entering the landfill,” Ramkissoon enthused in an email.
Crust has turned too-crisp cookies into crust for cheesecake “for years,” Benz says, but the challenge inspired her to seek out novel ways to give could-be discards new purpose. It turns out that too-gooey brownies make ideal ice cream add-ins or can be pressed into shells for ice cream pies.
While Benz doesn’t want to sell a subpar baked good, be it an underdone brownie or a cake cup approaching the end of its shelf life, she would “love for someone to still eat it,” so products not ripe for repurposing are donated. (“The end of our shelf life isn’t like this product is now bad,” Benz emphasizes.) Crust’s storefront is closed on Monday and Tuesday, so each Sunday, product that would be expired by Wednesday is donated, usually to Germantown Community Fridges or the commUNITY fridge at the Ridge Avenue coffee shop of Crust wholesale customer Unity Java.
Over the six-month Food Saver Challenge, participating businesses together donated more than $82,000 worth of food while diverting almost 85,000 pounds of food from the waste stream. Crust’s waste reduction efforts earned more than 1,800 points, more than any other competitor.
Without the challenge I could have still been sleeping on the fact that there’s so much valuable information within these [waste] logs that we already keep.”
— Meagan Benz, Crust Vegan Bakery
Benz credits the challenge with bringing Crust’s waste log, which predates the challenge, into more productive use. The log’s relevance to Crust’s standing in the competition strengthened the link in staffers’ minds between minimizing mistakes and keeping waste down, and the patterns discerned in the data have motivated Benz to continue making time to review the log regularly. “Without the challenge I could have still been sleeping on the fact that there’s so much valuable information within these logs that we already keep,” Benz says.
At a May 2 closing ceremony held at Crust’s commercial kitchen, the bakery was awarded a citation from the City, a trophy created by SBN member Remark Glass and a $5,000 check. Benz treated attendees to those scaled-down PB&J scones she’d innovated. Representatives of Food Saver Challenge partners Bennett Compost, Circle Compost, ClearCOGS, Drexel Food Lab, Share Food Program and Sharing Excess also enjoyed miniature blueberry muffins made with fruit that hadn’t been used in winter bakes in the quantities anticipated. “Everything we served was on theme,” Benz says. “It was a great way to continue to repurpose what would have been waste for the event about how we repurpose waste.”
The next iteration of the Food Saver Challenge is a partnership with Saxbys, a Certified B Corporation most of whose 100% student-run cafés are located on or near college campuses. The challenge will focus on reducing food waste during semester break periods at Saxbys cafés in Philadelphia.
