America wastes about 40% of its food. Roughly 120bn pounds a year, something like $218bn of value, while 35mm Americans (10mm of them kids) don't have enough to eat. Put those two facts side by side and the truth is hard to dodge: this was never a scarcity problem. It's a logistics problem.
So, this week's Shoutout goes to the operators and organizations choosing to solve it, and to the company that makes solving it easy: Copia. Full disclosure, Copia is a Branded portfolio company, so weigh my enthusiasm accordingly.
Here's the status quo most of the industry lives with. You pay a hauler to cart your surplus to a landfill. You pay to destroy good food, you absorb the loss, and you get nothing back. Food is already 22% of what sits in our landfills, and the restaurant industry spends roughly $162bn a year on waste-related costs. That's a lot of money to spend on zero.
Copia flips it. It calls itself "the donation engine for your business," and it runs like one: pick your surplus and schedule a pickup in a few minutes a day, let the platform auto-match a nonprofit (they post a 99% match rate), dispatch a driver, track chain of custody, and drop an audit-proof receipt and tax dashboard on your desk. The Cheesecake Factory, Ritz-Carlton and 1 Hotels are already on it.
And this is where donating beats hauling on the one axis operators actually answer to, the P&L. The federal enhanced tax deduction lets you write off more than your cost on donated food. The Bill Emerson Good Samaritan Food Donation Act shields good-faith donations from liability (that "what if someone gets sick" fear is largely handled by law). You trim hauling costs and Scope 3 emissions. And you feed your own community. Few operational decisions touch your finances, your environment, your people and your neighborhood all at once. This one does.
I know the hesitation. People assume donating is complicated and tossing is easy. In reality the barrier isn't willingness, it's perceived effort. Build donation into the workflow you already run, and it takes minutes, without disrupting a single shift. If it still feels like a heavy lift, you just haven't found the right partner yet, b/c with the right one it's one of the easiest processes you'll run.
Food donation gets treated like a "nice to have." It's not. Stop paying to throw away value you could be putting to work.
If you’d like to discuss what Branded is doing with Copia or how you can get involved, please click here or contact me directly.
