People over profits: New Boston grocery store helping to reduce both food waste and unaffordability
Daily Table, a not-for-profit grocery store, opened Thursday in Dorchester, a working-class neighborhood in Boston, featuring cheap, yet healthy foods that traditional grocers are unwilling to sell because of arbitrary 'use by' dates.
The store is the brainchild of Doug Rauch, the former president of Trader Joe's, after seeing tons of perfectly good food tossed out because the items were close to or had surpassed their listed sell-by dates.
Daily Table's food stock is mostly donated by food wholesalers and markets after it didn't sell or was surplus, NPR reported. Other items are acquired through the Greater Boston Food Bank, and the store is one of that agency's approved organizations, according to the . The food is sold at cost or for a slight mark-up, though customers should expect prices to fluctuate daily based on availability and donations.
Rauch told WBUR.
Americans trash 133 billion lbs (60 billion kg) of food ‒ mostly meat (including poultry and fish), vegetables and dairy products ‒ each year, according to a February 2014 report by the US Department of Agriculture (USDA). About 10 percent of that comes from retail food waste, either by grocery stores or restaurants.
If just 15 percent less food was wasted, America could actually cut hunger in half," Ben Simon of the Food Recovery Network told RT's Alexey Yaroshevsky in February.
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Yet, according to Feeding America, a national nonprofit network of food banks, 49 million people in the US ‒ or one in six Americans ‒ live in "food insecure" households, and processed meals and fast food are often much cheaper than fresh produce and other nutritious items.
Rauch told the in May.
Along with fresh produce, meat and dairy, the store sells healthy ready-to-cook meals and hot grab-and-go items designed to compete with fast food chains, Daily Table says on its website.
It took two years from the time Rauch announced his plans to open Daily Table for the store to come to fruition. He had to fight critics who said he was foisting food rejected by the rich onto the poor, he told WBUR.
"It's been a long time coming," he said.
Rauch notes that sell-by dates are not related to when food will spoil, but rather are tools for retailers and manufacturers to track and rotate products, he told the .
The store is membership-based, with shoppers needing to provide their ZIP codes to join. The intention is for the store to serve the surrounding neighborhood, which has historically been a food desert without access to many grocers.
Customer Manuel Goncalves paid attention to both the expiration dates and the prices before purchasing food at Daily Table, he told WBUR. Yet he still managed to buy enough food for to feed his family for a week... for just over $30.
he said.
It's not just customers at the Dorchester store who are applauding Daily Table. Organizations that seek to end hunger appreciate how Rauch is targeting food waste.
What Doug is doing is fantastic," Sasha Purpura, executive director of Food For Free, a nonprofit based in Cambridge that aims to bridge the gap between food waste and hunger, told the Boston Globe.
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