Waste NOT, Way Ahead of its Time, Matches Excess With Need
By Mike Saucier
The operation that delivered three million pounds of food to hungry people in 2016 is run out of an 8’ by 10’ office inside of a Scottsdale senior center.
Waste NOT lives up to its name. Not even an inch of office space is squandered. Its president and CEO, Dee Mitten, said they don’t get much walk-in traffic at its room-sized headquarters. “We’re pretty well hidden,” she said.
Its tiny office reflects the low profile of Waste NOT.
“Here we are celebrating our 30th birthday and in some quarters we’re still the best-kept secret in Phoenix,” Mitten told Frontdoors. “The main reason is that we’re behind the scenes. We’re not located in big huge facilities. There’s a perception that we’re a food bank but we’re not. We don’t warehouse food.”
Its refrigerated six trucks and van are housed at the Salvation Army, a relationship “we’ve had since the beginning of time,” Mitten said.
That arrangement helps keep Waste NOT’s overhead low.
“You can probably tell this is a one-woman office,” she said. A part-time office manager uses the office intermittently and the organization has the okay to occasionally use the conference room at the Granite Reef Senior Center.
Eight full-time and three part-time employees make up Waste NOT – of which five are drivers and a driving supervisor. On the administrative side, it has only one full-time and two part-time employees.
“We do a lot with a little,” Mitten said. The organization received the highest possible rating from Charity Navigator, a sort of Better Business Bureau for charities oversight. Mitten said they received a four-star rating for efficiency, fiscal management and its transparency. Mitten has been with Waste NOT for 15 years after she fell “in love with it.”
The genesis for Waste NOT came 30 years ago when a woman (there is no record of her name) observed good food going to waste at a resort in the Valley. “So she borrowed an old pickup truck and literally just began collecting the food and taking it to homeless shelters,” Mitten said.
On Saturday, March 25 from 3 p.m. to 7 p.m., Waste NOT is celebrating its 30 years of service by throwing a birthday party and saluting its food and financial donors at Enchanted Island on W. Encanto Blvd. in Phoenix. (Details: wastenotaz.org.)
From its origins as a sole pickup truck Waste NOT has grown but it’s still a lean operation.
“We have six big trucks and one refrigerated van that are picking up sometimes up to 20,000 pounds of food a day,” Mitten said. “And unlike a food bank we don’t take it back to the bank, sort it, separate it. Food is picked up in the morning and by two o’clock at the latest it’s off the trucks. So we are, I like to say, a logistics marvel.”
What they do is very simple, Mitten said. “It’s a great concept: take food from people who don’t need or want it and give it to those who do. It resonates with people. But behind the scenes it is very complex.”
By any measure, Waste NOT was way ahead of its time. As one of the oldest perishable food rescue organizations in the country, Waste NOT was fighting food waste and advocating for sustainability long before those became household terms.
“Just in the last year or so everything is ‘food waste, ‘food waste, sustainability, sustainability,’” Mitten said. “Not to be ornery but I’d like to say, ‘Hey we’ve been doing this for 30 years.’”
The public consciousness of this country is awakening to the issue of food waste, Mitten said.
“We live in the land of plenty,” she said. “Look around us. And when I tell people that one in four kids in our community go to bed hungry at night some of them question me. They don’t believe me. It’s a remarkable issue that’s so prevalent that it needs to be on people’s minds.”
Fighting food waste is not a simple process. It requires drivers who need to have a wealth of information about the routes, logistics and how to handle food.
“We are taking food that has been cooked from one serving container, big stainless steel serving containers, transferring into our containers,” Mitten said. “We have five routes and those routes are run every day. We have a given number of donors and a given number of recipients on each route every day.”
Drivers have to know when donors will be ready for the truck – they can’t just pull up to anyplace anytime – and the same thing has to happen on the recipient agency side.
“They have to intimately know what’s going on,” Mitten said. “Where we really shine is pulling up to buildings where people are just caring for one another and those people, if they could, would avail themselves to food from a food bank. So when the Waste NOT truck pulls up it’s a pretty special moment. And that is what we do all day long. We don’t know on a given day exactly what we’re getting in or how much. We know within reason what the pattern is but we don’t really know how it will play out.”
Waste NOT deals with random calls and special events. Its drivers collected 100,000 pounds of food after the Super Bowl.
The beauty of Waste Not lies in its simplicity.
“We have never deviated from our singular mission, which is the rescue of perishable food and the delivery thereof,” she said. “We haven’t started a soup kitchen. We are so grooved that we know exactly how to do what we do.”
The challenge is setting up consistent reliable food donors.
“You would think that that would be easy that everyone would be clamoring to donate their excess food but that isn’t the case because there are logistics, costs, details,” Mitten said. “It’s much easier when you own a restaurant and you’re busy to throw the food away than it is to prepare it, save it, hold it for pickup.”
Waste NOT gets calls from around the country from states and cities looking to replicate its perishable food program model.
Overall, Mitten, a former director of sales and marketing for hotels, said, Waste NOT is about helping those who need it and “waking people up to a problem we’ve had forever and that’s all the hungry people that we have.”
She recalls being “completely overwhelmed” as she stood in the middle of the street, watching the driver take the food. “I was so taken by the kindness, the generosity of people helping people so simply, giving them food that was going to be thrown away and taking it in and feeding hungry people.”
She is more fervent in her hope that people recognize that when they have an event or a party to “take the responsibility, talk to the meeting planner, whoever you’re setting your function up with, put it in the contract” to donate the excess food to Waste NOT. It’s a write off for the donor.
“We are small but mighty. But when we’re feeding thousands of people a day we’re not small,” she said.
