Millions of Americans are still living in fear of going hungry as SNAP food assistance payments may be delayed, even after a federal judge ordered the Trump administration to pay them in November. It is estimated that nearly $400 billion of food is at risk of being wasted in this country each year.
ReFED, a US-based nonprofit focused on food waste, recently released its 2025 report showing that $382 billion in surplus food was produced in 2023, the latest year of statistics available.
“40% of all food in the world ends up in the trash,” said Chris MacAulay, director of North American operations at Too Good to Go, a surplus food marketplace that has expanded to 70 cities. “Visualize what that means. It’s like standing in front of the fridge and throwing away half of it. It’s an incredible amount of waste,” Macaulay says.
Too Good to Go provides an outlet for food that would normally go to waste, rather than repurposing surplus food that could end up in food banks. We match supermarkets and restaurants with surplus ingredients with customers looking for reasonably priced products and meals. For example, your local pizzeria might have extra pies at the end of the night. Instead of throwing them in the trash, you can at least get something back by donating them to Too Good to Go. Consumers are given a “surprise bag” containing food that would otherwise have been sent to a landfill. Too Good to Go estimates that 8 meals are saved every second through its marketplace.
“We know that many Americans are feeling a significant strain on their grocery budgets, especially given that SNAP benefits may soon expire,” McCauley said. “You don’t know what you’re going to get, but you’ll get good food at 50 to 60 percent off,” he added.
Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said Sunday morning that payments could resume by Wednesday. The current SNAP crisis comes amid deep cuts to the food assistance program included in the Trump administration’s tax cuts, which will reduce payments across the country.
The main options for food waste are donation, composting, animal feed, and the surplus food market.
“The solution is not just one solution, but a combination of solutions. We think of this as a food waste supply chain,” Macaulay said, adding that grocery stores in particular are a good market for collecting surplus food.
His organization is not alone in recognizing the need for more solutions to this problem. From large investors to mom-and-pop shops, more and more people are realizing that food waste businesses have money to recover and feed people.
“The amount of deal activity and interest in this space is pretty impressive,” said Ephraim Kaplan, head of investment banking for environmental services, green infrastructure and energy transition at Brown Gibbons Lang & Company.
Kaplan said the waste management business is not new, but the consistency and predictability of revenue is attracting investors’ attention. “I’ve been in this business for 25 years, and I think it’s been undervalued for some time,” he said.
Sophisticated and deep-pocketed infrastructure investors looking for stable returns are discovering that waste can be profitable in the United States. “This type of capital has been popular in Europe for some time, but it’s still in its infancy here,” Kaplan said.
Although barriers to entry are becoming lower, entering the business still requires significant investment, often in equipment.
“I think technology has made it easier than ever before when you have a good idea,” Macaulay said.
Food waste from homes to commercial kitchens
Some solutions go directly to consumers. Mill, a startup founded by one of the creators of the Nest smart thermostat, is funding $100 million for a smart kitchen bin that eliminates food waste by drying, shrinking and deodorizing leftovers.
Other approaches are entering commercial waste generation points. Metafoodx, a startup that raised $9.4 million in Series A funding in May 2024, has developed a 3D AI scanner to track food in commercial kitchens. Track what is used, what goes to waste, and where there is room for improvement.
Buddy Bockweg, CEO of Vsimple, which works with industrial and environmental services companies (including waste management providers) to digitize and streamline operations from field dispatch to invoicing, says startups have a unique ability to deploy technology to compete with larger companies.
“AI can streamline everything on the dispatch side,” Bockweg says. “Companies that invest in technology to advance their businesses win and make more money.”
Tyler Frank, president and founder of Portland, Maine-based Garbage to Garden, started small and expanded. While living in an apartment, he realized there was no easy way to compost his waste, so he started his business in 2012 with $300 and a truck. Garbage to Garden offers compost buckets and subscription-based root pickup. The waste is composted and supplied to local farms, or subscribers can have the soil returned to them.
“I think the barrier to entry was low the way I did it, but it was a very long and difficult hill to climb. You have to achieve economies of scale,” Frank said. Part of his motivation was due to the knowledge that waste becomes a business, regardless of other economic factors. “This is a recession-proof business and an idea whose time has come,” Frank said.
What started as a one-bucket-at-a-time subscription has grown into contracts with more and more municipalities. Garbage to Garden currently serves 50,000 subscribers and has collection agreements in cities such as Boston and Medford, Massachusetts.
Low-income households waste less
While Frank’s business model doesn’t address the hunger issue, he says in fact, while composted waste may be decreasing during SNAP delays as people try to squeeze as much as they can out of their food, the overall trend and flow of food waste is increasing.
Ben Sharadin, an economics professor at Colby College, said the government is playing a big role in the innovation and growth happening in the sector, driven by federal waste reduction mandates and companies’ desire to be more efficient.
But the cruel irony of the current situation is that SNAP beneficiaries are more likely to waste food than other beneficiaries.
“Low-income households typically have lower food waste rates than higher-income households. When budget constraints are tight, households have less freedom,” Sharadin said. “Low-income households and SNAP households are better at planning their meal intake because they have to,” he says.
Sharadin said younger, wealthier households tend to be the most wasteful, and subscription composting services would be seen as a premium. He said the circular economy should be prepared for some impact from SNAP cuts, and business models like Too Good to Go should benefit.
“As consumers’ budgets tighten, we will see an acceleration of surprise movements in bags and secondary markets that at first glance appear to be of slightly lower quality,” Sharadin said.
Still, even though many companies are finding new ways to tackle the waste problem, “the first goal of food waste should be to reduce it,” Sharadin said.
