Making food waste reduction easy for small businesses: Q&A with Tastemakers shared kitchen
In 2018, after successfully growing the local fleet of Captain Cookie and the Milkman food trucks, Kirk and Juliann Francis opened the Tastemakers shared commercial kitchen in D.C.’s Brookland neighborhood. Today, more than 100 local businesses prep food in the 9,000 square-foot building, which boasts green features like solar panels and efficient windows. Earth-friendly waste management was tough to maintain as food businesses struggled to survive during the pandemic, but grant funding from the DC Department of Small and Local Business Development has helped Tastemakers donate surplus meals and compost more than ever. RescueDish’s Rachael Jackson spoke with Kirk about everything from the tricky calculus of fridge and freezer space to the importance of making sustainability convenient for busy entrepreneurs.
I have to ask…are you Captain Cookie?
I am the original Captain Cookie. But we also have many other Captain Cookies at this point.
How did your experience with Captain Cookie influence your approach to sustainability at Tastemakers?
With Captain Cookie, we started on a shoestring with the very first cookie truck. We worked out of several shared kitchens and none offered composting.
When we built Tastemakers, we were more intentional in designing a space to operate with less energy and with the cost of composting and recycling built into the membership. It wouldn’t be something that each individual business was deciding, but it’s something that we as a facility built into our cost of doing business.
About 100 members, ranging from large catering businesses to people getting a feel for moonlighting in the food business, prep food at Tastemakers. Some stop by a few times a month, others several times a week. Most of Tastemakers’s 9,000 square feet is devoted to commercial kitchen space, but there is also a food hall open to the public.
What have been your biggest challenges in minimizing food waste?
Making it convenient is the real trick. Everyone is a small food business and getting help is very difficult right now. For reducing food waste to be a reality it has to be very, very simple and not something that’s going to add 15 minutes to their day.
Tell me about your new donation fridge.
That’s our main purchase with the Food Waste Innovation Grant, a large two-door fridge. It’s a glass front so you can see inside. It sits in our lobby and is free for any member to put their leftover food in. All they have to do is label and date it and notify Food Rescue and they will get it distributed.
When someone’s coming back from a super long day and they have some extra servings of pork loin, they don’t have the time to call around to see who is available to pick up pork loin. They’re exhausted. They would rather throw it somewhere and be done with it. No one can afford unlimited freezer or refrigerated space so they have to be judicious with what they keep and what they throw away. Kicking the cost factor out of the refrigerated storage makes donating almost as easy as throwing it out. Without that I doubt we would be generating very many donations at all.
Tastemakers used FWIG funding to purchase a fridge where businesses can place meals ready for donation via Food Rescue US. It has made it far easier for businesses to donate food as they no longer have to worry about finding a place to store the food or tracking down a nonprofit who is willing to accept it.
Are you using Too Good To Go to rescue treats that nonprofits can’t take?
[Editor’s note: Nonprofits can’t always accept sweet treats, given the health needs of the populations they serve. Too Good To Go is an app that connects consumers to surplus, discounted food.]
Yeah! Captain Cookie does use Too Good To Go. We started a year ago and it’s been really good. There have been some hiccups though. Too Good To Go is explicitly for stuff that otherwise would have gone to waste. Occasionally we get aggravated when we get a negative review like, “My cookie was overdone.”
Well, yes it was, and that’s why you got a baker’s dozen for $5 instead of $18. They’re all still decent, but they’re not the quality of the stuff we’d be selling and that’s the premise. In general we’re really happy to have stuff out there that’s getting used and eaten rather than going in the trash or the compost bin.
Kirk Francis, co-founder of Tastemakers shared kitchen and Captain Cookie. The cookie and ice cream sandwich company sells extra treats at a discount via the Too Good To Go app. While the cookies you see here are picture perfect, sometimes overdone, surplus or otherwise imperfect cookies are sold through the app. “Too Good to Go has definitely kept a lot of cookies out of the trash or compost bin,” Kirk said. (Image courtesy of Tastemakers)
How did you recently expand your composting program?
We’ve been composting since day one at Tastemakers. With the grant we were able to expand into a larger composting package with Compost Cab. With the additional capacity we’re close to recycling 100 percent of our food scraps. Especially during the pandemic when a lot of our members went out of business, this grant helps take financial pressure off of our composting, making sure it’s not something we have to reduce or cut when operating with a reduced budget.
So before would you fill up your bin and then say, “OK, we can’t compost anymore because we’ve met our limit,” and then trash the rest?
Yes, exactly. Which we hate doing, but there’s only so much I can charge people to be part of the shared kitchen. Composting is expensive. Unfortunately, trash is the cheapest. You have to sift through the compost, you have to make sure there aren’t any plastic bags or rubber bands or things like that in there. Everything has to be cleaned constantly. It’s labor intensive. While everyone wants to be part of a green kitchen, there’s not a lot of bottomline profit available right now. Composting is something that’s more of a “nice to have” for most businesses rather than a necessity.
Compost bins ready to be filled with food scraps at Tastemakers. Members keep bins at their stations and fill them as they prep their food. When the bins are full, janitors take them to the larger compost toters in the back alley, then sanitize them and return them to use. Compost Cab picks up compost twice a week. The shared commercial kitchen went from composting 60 percent of its food scraps to 100 percent after a DC government grant helped them afford increased capacity. (Image courtesy of Tastemakers)
Are diners able to compost as well?
We don’t have compost bins out in the public area. That has proven to be pretty messy. Inevitably they’re almost two-thirds full of things that aren’t compostable. There’s also not that much food waste generated from our customers because most people are taking food to go.
Do your makers ever collaborate to conserve resources?
With so many businesses working together in the same space and being naturally frugal and not wanting to waste, we’re able to save a lot before it even gets to the compost bin by finding someone in the kitchen who can use that item.
Shrub District, which made infused cocktail mixers and things, worked out of our kitchen for several years. They would take the zest off the fruit, but they wouldn’t need the juice. Other people in the kitchen used the orange juice to make mimosas or popsicles and used the lemon juice in cooking.
Another business, Nano Salad, made dehydrated fiber products. They would only use the fiber from a carrot or a turnip. So we had people who used the juice in soups or to color dishes.
Do you incentivize makers to maximize the use of each ingredient so there’s less to compost? Or is a lot of your compost just things that are truly “done,” like bones that have already been boiled for broth?
We do our best to educate people, “Hey the bottoms of the broccoli are edible, just maybe peel them and slice them.”
But, coconut husks, for example, there’s not a lot you can do with them unless you’re looking to shred them for fiber matting. Ditto for food scraps already boiled for stock. When we’re talking about between 600 and 800 gallons a week of food scraps there’s a limit to how many of those you need to create stock or demi-glace or whatever. At some point you have enough stock, which I know sounds crazy.
I understand. I sometimes make shrubs from fruit scraps, but there was a point where my freezer was all orange peels and it didn’t make sense.
Yeah, true. And you’re using freezer space that’s a valuable commodity. You keep something frozen for two months and there’s a dollar price associated with that. We have a couple wholesale coffee makers and so we have a whole lot of coffee grounds as well. Again, there’s a limit to what you can do with that. We do have a small garden in the front and we use a little bit of anything, like coffee grounds, that can be tilled directly into the soil. Most food scraps need to be heavily composted before you can use them because otherwise you’re going to attract rodents into the area.
Coffee grounds from Tastemakers businesses help fertilize the soil in this garden near the organization’s front door. (Image courtesy of Tastemakers)
In addition to sharing resources, do you see sustainability collaboration between the various makers?
We see best practices passed along. A lot of times being more sustainable coincides with spending less on packaging or food. Like, “Oh, you’re able to wrap your product using half of the amount I’m using to package my stuff. What’s the name of your vendor? Show me how you’re folding that.”
And the peer pressure with two-thirds of the people in the kitchen recycling and composting helps demystify it for businesses that had never seen it before. So they give it a try and hopefully when they graduate from Tastemakers and move to their own spaces, they’ll take those good practices with them.
Has covid impacted how you manage waste?
Covid obviously was very detrimental to a lot of the food businesses at Tastemakers. We ended up with about 20 percent of our membership going out of business. For a lot of people just surviving as an enterprise superseded surviving as a green, sustainable enterprise. When you’re worried about staying in business and being able to pay your bills, shelling out additional money for eco-friendly packaging becomes less urgent.
And, covid was terrible for packaging. All of a sudden everything has to be individually wrapped, people are using gloves more than ever before. There was so much trash generated during the pandemic. In many ways it was a step backward for sustainability.
Are you able to use more sustainable packaging?
We do our best. It’s not simple, unfortunately. We package things in recyclable plastic. We’re incorporating paper packaging as much as possible. But people like to see their cookies and their ice cream sandwiches, so you want something with a window and you need to make sure it’s still recyclable. It requires a lot of study to find something that’s responsible and not just paying lip service to sustainability.
Is it true that Tastemakers used to be a mayonnaise factory?
When we first went into the building we were looking into the floor and we found two manhole covers. We opened them and they weren’t sewer manholes; they went down to gigantic, empty underground steel tanks. And they were attached to this weird pump contraption. What we eventually found out is that the railroad spur ran directly next to Tastemakers and tankers of vegetable oil would be poured directly into these huge, cylindrical, 15 foot by 8 foot diameter steel tanks. Then this huge mayonnaise-making machine was built on top. It pumped up the vegetable oil from these storage tanks and then sent mayonnaise back out on the train or large trucks. Fortunately the tanks were completely empty and clean and in structurally good condition. We thought about investing a bazillion dollars to turn them into the coolest speakeasy ever, but we ended up just covering them up.
Whoa! How did you retrofit the building to be more sustainable?
When we built Tastemakers, composting and being green in general was something we wanted to integrate into the foundation of the shared kitchen. We put solar panels on the roof; that takes care of 30 - 50 percent of our electricity. We put in additional insulation beyond what was required; we did a cool, white roof to use less energy. We have a lot of efficiency measures with our hot water circulation. We put in a lot of windows, but heavily insulated special windows so we could have natural light, but not a lot of solar energy heating up the place. We’ve got big fans to circulate air inside and reduce the HVAC needed. Everything that we can, we wired to be three-phase electricity which is more efficient for certain types of machinery than regular types of electricity.
We put 4 inches of insulation under the refrigerator to help keep the cold in because cold tends to travel down. If you aren’t careful about insulating a walk in freezer it could end up breaking the concrete because it will gradually freeze the soil underneath it and the water in the soil will expand so you’ll get a freezer that slowly builds itself a little hill and pops itself out of the concrete slab by creating a frost heave underneath it
A cooking class at Tastemakers. A number of building features help reduce the shared kitchen’s footprint, including a water fountain/bottle filler in the kitchen area to reduce plastic water bottles, and photocell LED lighting that uses less electricity. (Image courtesy of Tastemakers)
Is there anything you’d like to see customers do that would make it easier for you to waste less and operate more sustainably?
You can vote with your business. I think one thing that customers just need to understand is that being green usually costs more. Even though it seems like you're using less packaging or you’re getting more out of your food than other people, there’s a whole lot more manpower needed and so the cost usually goes up because labor is the biggest cost in the service industry. And, if you don’t need 100 napkins and you don’t need 100 ketchup packets and you don’t need five straws, then don’t take that many.
Is there anything else you’d like to share about your sustainability victories and challenges?
The District's SREC program has been really helpful to making solar power financially worthwhile for us. In fact, we’re going to have basically our entire roof covered in panels at the end of this year. And we’re really grateful that there are multiple compost vendors operating in DC. All of them are wonderful companies that we’re happy to do business with. And, the work of Capital Area Food Bank, DC Central Kitchen and many others is really great.
Compost at Tastemakers awaiting pick-up by Compost Cab. (Image courtesy of Tastemakers).
This conversation was conducted over the phone and has been edited and condensed.