What Food Waste-to-Feed Solutions Need to Work for Retailers

(2026 ReFED Food Waste Solutions Summit in Charlotte)

The sustainability case for turning food waste into animal feed is strong. Animal feed is one of the best uses for food that can no longer be consumed by humans. Despite this, animal feed remains an underused destination for retail food waste. This raises the question: 

Why is food waste from grocery retailers seldom used as animal feed? Because food waste-to-animal-feed solutions must work within the realities of commercial retail operations. That was the lesson I took home from the ReFED Food Waste Solutions Summit in Charlotte, North Carolina. The event brought together retailers, investors and policymakers to discuss the latest approaches and challenges in the mission to reduce food waste.

Over the summit, I explored two approaches that show how tighter integration with retail operations can enable higher-value uses of food waste: Divert’s retail food waste recovery system, and Mill’s collaboration with Whole Foods Market.

Together, these examples highlight four features that food waste-to-feed systems must have to succeed in retail environments.

Collection must be low-friction

For food waste-to-feed pathways to be commercially viable, waste collection must be easier than disposal. All additional steps that require time, movement, or attention create friction in the workflow of grocery store employees. In many retail settings, waste recovery procedures require staff to leave the retail floor to manually separate waste from packaged products. This extra effort creates a behavioural barrier to sorting waste at a retail level. Divert reduces this friction by placing its collection bins directly within food preparation areas, giving store employees direct access without leaving their workstations. 

Systems must tolerate imperfect inputs

Collection systems should be designed for human error rather than ideal operating conditions. Store employees working at speed will occasionally place items with residual packaging, such as stickers, rubber bands, or plastic film, into collection bins. Any system that demands perfectly separated inputs will either produce contaminated outputs or require costly manual sorting upstream. Divert seeks to address this challenge with depackaging technology that uses a water-based process to separate food from packaging during processing, enabling it to handle mixed or imperfect inputs while maintaining output quality. 

Modularity is essential at retail scale

Sorting waste streams is an essential part of retail food waste management. A grocery store produces a wide range of waste streams, including produce, dairy, deli and meat. Each waste stream must be kept separate for regulatory compliance and traceability purposes. Mill’s collaboration with Whole Foods shows how this can be done. Instead of a centralised collection point, they look to deploy simple modular units across store departments to accept different waste streams. This setup integrates directly into store operations in a way that’s simple for staff to use. It also improves resilience, as individual units can be emptied without taking the whole system offline.

(Divert’s retail food waste recovery facility)

Outputs must justify investment 

Food waste-to-feed systems can only scale when the end product has clear, tangible value. Divert facility processes collected organic waste through anaerobic digestion to produce renewable natural gas and fertiliser, both of which have established markets and measurable environmental benefits. Mill’s partnership demonstrates the end-to-end value of the feed loop: in-store food waste becomes feed for egg-laying hens whose eggs return to Whole Foods shelves. In both cases, the value of the output strengthens the business case for investment in collection infrastructure, giving retail partners a reason to engage beyond compliance or sustainability commitments.

Implementation is the next challenge

Taken together, these four requirements (low-friction collection, tolerance for imperfect inputs, modularity, and valuable end products) demonstrate that retail food waste can be diverted from landfills and used as animal feed. 

The underlying technologies already exist, and these early partnerships demonstrate what is possible. The challenge now is scaling these models across a broad range of retail contexts. That’s where the next phase of this work begins.

To learn about waste-to-feed technologies, check out our shared ReFed report, Closing the Loop: Evaluating Food Waste-to-Feed Pathways for a Circular Food System