Recommendation to receive and file a presentation Waste Not OC Coalition, a food recovery program for an effective and cost-efficient food recovery model for City Manager to decide at a later date if partnership with Waste Not OC is an effective model for Long Beach.
Thank you. And item 34. Well. Council Member Communication from Council Member Pearce. Councilman Super North Council Member. Council. Member Richardson Recommendation received a final presentation from Waste not Ozone Coalition. Never again. Sorry the system broke up a little bit. Yes. Thank you. This is a great item that I'm really excited about. As many of you guys know, I've been taking some classes and I had a presentation by this organization was really inspired by their mission to be able to use logistics to ensure that no food is going wasted from restaurants in different locations, and ensuring that food is getting either repurposed or getting donated to the appropriate places so that we can help with our people that are food insecure. Tom and I have had many conversations about how great all the work has been during COVID to ensure that our seniors and different people are getting access to food. But we know that that's an issue that doesn't just happen in the middle of a pandemic that goes beyond that. And so I had asked him to come and give a brief presentation. My hope is that after this presentation that this organization could partner with the city, have some conversations, and maybe there's a good way to work together moving forward. So with that, I do believe that our staff has a presentation. Thank you. And Mike, take it away. Thank you so much. Thank you so much for waiting so long to both you and the other organization. Appreciate it. No, that's quite all right. Thank you very much, Mayor. Council members, thank you for allowing me to be the first one to say good morning to everybody. We're going to make this quick in large part because it's been a long night and because I've pounded four cups of coffee since 6:00. So we're going to go pretty quickly. My name is Mike Lee, Iraq. I serve as the executive director of Waste, Not Our Communities. I'm also a 35 year food industry lifer and for the last 28 years, a restaurateur. So if we could go to the next slide, I would like to share with you a regional solution I think is ideal for Long Beach. It is the waste sea model for food recovery to assist in ending food insecurity formed in 2012 by the public health officer for the County of Orange. We created the food recovery model in 2014. It is now widely regarded as the most effective food recovery and food waste reduction model in the country, recognized by calorie cycle last year as a model practice. And unfortunately, due to COVID this year, it proved to be a pretty effective emergency food management tool. So let's go to the next slide. In essence, we are the food recovery conductor. We are a public, private, nonprofit coalition. We do not compete with anyone. We act on behalf of the municipality, on behalf of the food donors and all of the various partners. We consider ourselves the conductor of an orchestra. As you see by the graphic, you'll see waste haulers, nonprofit organizations that do the heavy lifting on the ground. Municipalities, logistics providers. Food industry, county governments. They're all players. We connect those dots. We get everybody singing on the same sheet of music. Next slide. Basically we connect the entire food supply chain. We fill in the gaps that exist naturally in all of those existing efforts. From a food insecurity standpoint. We work with food health care providers to provide food or food insecurity screening questions. We provide food mapping so that those that screen positive have a place to go, an action plan. We also provide medically tailored meals for those who are food insecure, that have healthy dietary restrictions. From the recycling standpoint, we make sure there's an effective food rescue program in place. We have developed food recovery kitchens to repurpose existing large scale donations from processors and manufacturers and distributors, and we provide, most importantly, compliance data along the line. We elevate support services, and most importantly, we have provided innovative tools such as routines, recovery kitchens, solar powered cold storage and an emergency meal program. Next slide. Our outcomes so far in just Orange County alone, over £64 million of excess edible food recovered since 2015. And that is food that's been recovered and has actually fed people not recovered. It diverted to pantries where it is then wasted. In that second column, you'll see what we're very proud of. The waste rate at these nonprofit pantries who are serving as receptacles oftentimes for donors has dropped dramatically. Our goal is to get it in the single digits and it can it's easily obtainable. The last two columns you'll see that the food insecurity screening has yielded 185,000 families screened, 9000 patients identified as food insecure, have sent and directed to nonprofit pantries. Next slide. As you know, SB 1383 looms large. It is in effect, the fines and penalties will start in 2024, but it's in 2022 that we have to show that we are compliant, meaning the municipalities. And unfortunately for municipalities, the onus is on you to comply. There are no good faith considerations. And if you look at that last bullet point, there are 2025 requiring a 20% increase in recovery of currently disposed edible food. Doesn't seem like a daunting number, but what makes it more difficult? It is a moving target. As the food industry makes adjustments due to higher waste hauling costs, that target gets harder to hit. Next slide, please. The consequences, aside from just the daily fines and penalties. Most importantly, and I think the city manager will concur that potential litigation is what keeps most people up at night in noncompliance. You can bet that there will be suitors lined up to pursue litigation. Next slide, please. What we do to comply, provide compliance for municipalities is we track and record all the excess edible food donations from all of the organizations. It's a difficult task, but we're uniquely qualified because we are a coalition. We're including all of the local efforts that are already in place. We do not compete with any of them. We augment. We provide them with resources. We provide all of these nonprofit pantries, several of which I've heard from tonight. We provide them with the ability to participate in a buying program. So they get volume discount purchasing on some of those things they buy all the time. We provide a customer relation management platform to be able to provide a shared outreach touchpoint so we can track the city's outreach, the haulers outreach, and then our own outreach. And then we help by conducting peer to peer outreach, where food industry individuals, we're all professionals. We speak the food industry language. Next slide, please. This is just a smattering of some of the entities that work with us. You're going to recognize a lot of them. They're a combination of retail, grocery chains, restaurant companies, food service distributors, sports and entertainment. You're going to see health care providers, food recovery organizations, food banks, and then waste haulers. And this is just an idea. This is how we bring people together for a common goal. Go to the next slide, please. And how we do this is through a comprehensive municipal approach. And again, we tie up all the loose ends. We work with the city's waste recycling department, also building and planning, because any restaurant that wants to open in your city, it has to go to the planning and building department. It's a great opportunity to make them aware of SB 1383 arrangements for food donation, how to store food and also food waste diversion parks and recreations. Because once we get past COVID, we're going to return, hopefully to events being held at parks that often feature food service, school districts, medical care providers, and then, of course, service industry organizations similar to the restaurant associations and then also trade organizations. So the next slide, please. The innovation I discussed earlier. Pantry Mapping. We provide an up to date pantry map that shows hours of operations locations where people can go for access to food in the city of Long Beach. Next is food insecurity, screening, working with medical care providers. These two simple screening questions are now part of the American Academy of Pediatrics Toolkit, and hunger originated with waste not only implemented throughout Orange County. So the next slide. Using technology to identify available food with donors or matching donors with recipients, and most importantly, mitigating food safety concerns by tracking the time and temperature of the product when it's picked up and delivered. This will give a comfort level to food donors. It allows restaurants, hotels, grocery stores the opportunity to donate and feel safe. That food has been handled the same as it's being handled for profit. Next slide. Food Recovery Kitchen Network in Orange County. We are now producing 60,000 individually packaged meals each week through our network of food recovery kitchens that also provide culinary job training, all utilizing excess edible food donated from distributors, manufacturers and processors. And then finally, the last link of the chain was the ability to provide additional portable cold storage. In our case, we see them all the time in the port of Long Beach, the shipping containers used to move food back and forth across the ocean. We have successfully converted the first one to fully solar powered. It's a tremendous cold storage and logistics solution. It's a great way to get food out in the community and also a component of an emergency meal plan. Next slide, please. Now, as you know, charitable feeding tends to be disjointed just because it's difficult to to really be able to connect all the dots. What we do is we work with the public, private nonprofit efforts, do a needs assessment, provide a strategic plan, bring all the partners together and successfully manage food recovery in the city. Next slide. Again, COVID has taught us this is an emergency meal program. The slide you're seeing is all packaged meals prepared with food that is recovered as part of an inventory of in Orange County. We're building to a 1 million meal inventory so that in case of an earthquake in, there's a loss of power. The solar powered freezers keep this food frozen. It's ready to distribute in the community that these freezers are located. And these are providing ready to heat and eat meals to the community for at least the first 24, 48 hours until aid can get into the neighborhood. Next next slide, please. The bottom line is edible. Food recovery has caused benefits. Cost benefits to the food donor. Cost benefits to the waste hauler. Because it's a lot easier and cheaper to recover excess edible food than it is to divert it according to state law. Once it becomes a food waste, it's cost benefits to the city and also cost benefits to the health care industry. Next slide. You're going to start to see a couple or a few comments from those who we've worked with. Again, we are now working not only in Orange County but all throughout the country. The state of Mississippi has adopted the model. Ramsey County, Minnesota, King County, Washington. And let's go to the next slide. See the last two. But you'll see that this is a comprehensive program. It is definitely a regional effort. It is not simply a municipal effort. The food industry does not comprehend county border city lines. They understand regions and portfolios are going to have to present the presentation. Time is up. So thank you. No problem. Councilmember Pierce, is that a motion to receive and file the report? Yes, it is. Thank you. Is there any public comment on this? There's no public comment on this item. Okay. Then we will have a vote, please. And this is a motion by counsel appears in the second by councilors in the house. District one. I'm District two. I District three. Oh. District four. By. District five. District seven. By. District eight. District nine. I ocean carries. Good. Thank you. We're going to take a couple items. We have 55 and 56, I think are the audiences that need our readings. So let's do it. Let's do those. I know some folks are starting to I'm going to start losing folks.