By one estimate, New Jersey wastes at least 1.6 million tons of food a year, from consumers discarding items that are at or near their “best-by” date to farmers tilling excess crops back into the soil because it’s less expensive than to package and distribute them or food buyers who sometimes reject whole shipments of otherwise sellable food because a few items are spoiled.

Now all that waste is getting additional attention as the authors of a new report call on the state to do a better job of diverting food away from landfills and to the tables of families that need it.

In 2023, New Jersey had a monthly average of almost 800,000 people who received help from the federal Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), formerly known as food stamps, meeting the definition of food insecurity.

The report from the nonprofit Move For Hunger looked specifically at the challenges in a nine-county area of South Jersey and said better coordination and resources could save tons of otherwise wasted food.

What’s recommended

It recommends increased efforts to recover food from supermarkets and improved education and awareness among consumers and businesses on preventing food waste. Another recommendation is to set up at least one nonprofit food “hub” for the state that would  collect emergency food from producers, donors and food-recovery efforts and prepare it for distribution.

“These recommendations are made through the lens of accomplishing the two goals of food recovery,” says the 30-page report to be released today. “To increase the amount of food available to those experiencing food insecurity, and to decrease food waste and loss, and its impact on our climate.”

The report resulted from research between November 2023 and March 2024, and covered 51 stakeholders in the production, recovery and distribution of food in South Jersey. It was funded by The Tepper Foundation. The region had about a quarter-million people who were classified as food-insecure in 2021. The nine counties covered by the report are Monmouth, Ocean, Burlington, Camden, Atlantic, Gloucester, Salem, Cumberland and Cape May. Five of the counties have higher rates of food insecurity than the statewide average of 8.8%.

The challenges of food waste and efforts to eliminate it were the focus of a special project this summer as part of NJ Spotlight News’ Change Project.

The Move For Hunger report recommends improved communications between emergency suppliers of fresh food, and for breaking down what it calls “silos” in the food-aid ecosystem. It also calls for stakeholders such as cold-storage facilities to donate space to store perishable food.

Food recovery

“While many producers and companies handling food are making concerted efforts to donate any edible food, there are undoubtedly opportunities for additional education around food recovery,” according to the report.

The report calls for companies to train their employees to support food recovery, and for farmers to increase their capacity for food donations including by “gleaning” — recovering farm crops that won’t be sold — and providing temporary cold storage.

Food is being wasted at every stage of the supply chain, the report says, from the initial processing and packaging to consumers forgetting to use a food item at the back of their fridge.

Adam Lowy, founder and chief executive of Move For Hunger, said the creation of food “hubs” would go beyond the current work of the state’s major food banks such as the state’s largest, the Community Food Bank of New Jersey.

As effectively the wholesalers in the emergency food system, the food banks receive food from suppliers and then send it to local pantries that distribute it to the public. But they don’t have the capacity in the case of farm produce to wash it, or in the case of donated food to repackage it for distribution, he said.

“The food bank is not necessarily a packager or a processor, particularly when it comes to fresh food,” Lowy said in an interview. “They just don’t have the capacity and the refrigeration space to be able to do things like that. Then sometimes the food is going out of state or never being picked. We are literally leaving food on the table.”

What new state agency is doing

The group’s report will add to research being conducted now by New Jersey’s Office of the Food Security Advocate, a new agency that aims to coordinate the disparate efforts of nonprofits, governments, community groups and religious centers in feeding the hungry. The office has pledged to have its own report completed in the next year.

“We are providing a different layer of research which [the state] can take and use,” Lowy said. “We are working with food banks and pantries, cold-storage providers, transportation companies, growers. People were getting very open and honest about what was working and what was not working.”

Mark Dinglasan, executive director of the state office, welcomed the report as a valuable contribution to the discussion of how to curb food insecurity.

“I am encouraged to see the report highlight some of the key initiatives that OFSA is supporting and working on,” Dinglasan said in a statement. “We still need as much evidence as possible to support the need for greater innovation and collaboration in the food security space and this evidence is collected and captured through active listening and documentation of what organizations, stakeholders and communities need to build stronger food systems.”

Carolyn Lake, executive director of the Interfaith Food Pantry in Morris Plains, said the document identified some outstanding needs in New Jersey’s emergency food system even if it didn’t propose new solutions.

“I don’t see that there’s anything necessarily new,” she said. “What I see is a very thorough job of explaining the challenges. I appreciated the dispelling of the notion that all we needed to do to combat food insecurity is get what other people don’t want.

“[Lowy] did a good job spelling out that there is a cost to this, and a lot of it falls on the local distributing agency to purchase the fresh food that they can’t get through food-rescue efforts.”

Increased demand

Rose Rodriguez, the New Jersey portfolio manager for The Tepper Foundation, said it funded the study because it wanted to better understand the nature of and possible solutions to the state’s food-insecurity problem.

“We have been thinking more strategically about how we engage in food security,” she said in an interview. “We want to ensure that the emergency food system in New Jersey is resilient. I just kept hearing from partners on the ground about logistical challenges. So we thought ‘What’s the actual problem? Let’s figure out what are the actual challenges.’”

Credit: (AP Photo/Ted Shaffrey)

In 2022, the foundation published a separate report detailing how New Jersey’s emergency food system had responded fairly well to a big increase in demand during the pandemic, but also showed some shortcoming that needed to be addressed, including in the reduction of food waste.

The new report was welcomed by the Assembly Speaker Craig Coughlin (D-Middlesex), a leading advocate for increased state help to the food-insecure, who said he had yet to review the report but praised its intentions.

“We are blessed with a bounty of talented, tenacious advocates, experts, and frontline workers in this struggle,” he said in a statement. “We will continue to build on our success and work with a broad range of organizations as we scale up the effort to increase access to nutritious food and reduce waste statewide with improved systems to end hunger in our state.”