SparCs, Bronx, NY

Baldor Specialty Foods has embarked on an ambitious initiative to dramatically reduce the waste it generates across all is business sectors. This initiative seeks to explore opportunities to reduce waste in three areas: Energy use and generation, reduce overall waste by repurposing, recycling and reusing assets and to reduce to zero the amount of food product that is being sent to landfill from its Fresh Cuts production facility. The management of all food products remaining from Fresh Cuts product is referred to as SparCs.   

SparCs is Baldor’s creative approach to finding opportunities to put to use all its leftover food products from its Fresh Cuts production. Our solution has helped highlight the need for all companies to come up with solutions to combat America’s food waste crisis.  Sounds like a tall order, right?  It definitely is. Each year, the U.S. wastes up to 40% of its food supply through a combination of production losses, the discarding of food at retail establishments and, food that is purchased but not consumed at home. Changing cultural norms around the purposeful use of all food assets will come from the food industry. So we are committed to sending zero organics to landfill from our Fresh Cuts production and eventually from all our facilities. In 2016, we achieved our goal of reaching zero organics to landfill from our Fresh Cut’s production. We proved that it can be one.

SparCs takes a three tiered approach to maximize the use of our assets at every juncture of our business cycle. First and foremost, we want to ensure that 100% of the edible product in our warehouse gets eaten by a person or an animal. Sounds reasonable, right? In order to accomplish this goal, we are working with a number of chefs to put SparCs to work in sauces, cookies, broths, etc. We are also partnered with a number of farmers who feed SparCs to their pigs to improve the quality of their animal feed while creating a sustainability, nutritious feed lot. We are also preparing to launch our first ever SparCs based retail/foodservice products! The SparCs Veggie Blend, while still in its development stage, transforms trimmings from our Fresh Cuts processing facility into a nutrient-dense powder for soups, smoothies, baked goods and more.

Over the past year, we’ve seen major results from SparCs: our fresh cuts facility has become a 100% organics to landfill diverted and we have made major strides to reduce other waste streams including cardboard, pallets and plastics. It is just the beginning. We’re motivated by the creativity, innovation and momentum in this waste reduction space these days.  Stay tuned for more news and please reach out to learn more about our sustainability initiatives and how they can positively impact your business!