As landfills are topping out and consumers growing more empowered in their buying decisions, food service supply chains are looking at sustainability with fresh eyes from the engineers designing food packaging to the restaurateurs buying product and the suppliers outfitting kitchens.

Options for game changing decision making are there.

Today, we're going to talk to the experts to see just how sustainability fits into the food service industry.

I'm Jasmin Singer and this is Environmental Connections, Joining me in the studio are Neal Sherman, who is the founder and CEO of TAGeX Brands who's here to discuss how his company is innovating sustainable practices in restaurant equipment management.

Welcome, Neal.

Thank you.

Thanks so much for being here.

We also have Christopher Bates, an acclaimed sommelier and leader of Element Winery and the FLX Hospitality Group, who will share his journey in promoting climate friendly practices in the wine industry.

Welcome, Christopher.

Thank you for having me.

Thank you so much.

And finally, Daniel Johnson, the professor and chair of Packaging and Graphic Media Science at Rochester Institute of Technology, Dan brings his insights on sustainable packaging, which is a key element in transforming the food industry.

Welcome, Dan.

Thank you.

Thank you for having me.

As the former senior editor of Vegnews magazine, I have witnessed from the sidelines how hard it is to start up a new restaurant.

And so in preparing for this episode, I was astonished, really, to learn the scale of the risk.

60% of restaurants fail in the first year and 80% in the first five years.

There is a lot of equipment that would go into all of those failed restaurants and to opening a restaurant, I suppose.

So how did you first come to ponder the after life of failed restaurant equipment and create this solution?

Sure.

I appreciate being here and bringing focus to building a better planet through the food industry.

the early days of our business, we provided food service kiosks for supermarkets, soup bars, salad bars, frozen yogurt kiosks.

Every time we'd show up, the supermarket would ask us to take away the equipment.

And at first, you know, we were insulted that, you know, we would be responsible for disposition.

And then we realized that there was some demand there and we managed to sell it all off, bring back the proceeds to the retailers.

And they were like, no one ever gave us money for that stuff.

they asked us to take on other responsibilities when we started building proceeds.

And then over time, we realized there was a huge demand among independent restaurants, even chains, to test and tinker with things.

The restaurant equipment industry is a $14 billion industry in the U.S. New.

Wow.

And so we've made a market in the aftermarket and we have facilities in L.A., Dallas, soon to be Florida, and we recycled the old Seneca Army depot, which is what we acquired 23 years ago, the warehouse area.

And that's where we operate out of.

This is TAGeX Brands.

This is our main facility in the Finger Lakes, in upstate New York.

And in this facility, we basically receive equipment, we document it, we launch it on our website, and then we sell it to people around the country.

The surplus we get here is a byproduct of people closing restaurants, supermarkets, convenience stores, remodeling those places, and rather than that equipment ending up in a landfill, our clients have us sell it to the next user.

The people that buy from us are either people that clean it up and bring it to other places, sell it to other people, or it's the end user restaurant that historically couldn't afford new equipment.

This truck is on its way to Long Island.

A very large Dunkin Donuts franchisee is opening an Indian grocery and he's filling up this truck all from us from TAGeX.

I believe in taking care of the environment, leaving it for the next generation and thinking that all the landfills that we have just in our region multiplied by the US population.

It's a scary thought and it makes me feel good that we're doing our little part to keep these things out of the landfill.

Christopher Bates, here, from FLX Table, part of FLX Hospitality Home Hospitality Group that has restaurants throughout the Finger Lakes from Corning to Dundee to Geneva.

Just wanted to introduce you to a little bit of the reason that we're such huge fans of TAGeX and what they've been able to do for us and for the restaurant industry as a whole So right now we're in the table kitchen and we have a couple of things that we've been able to use from them, from this refrigerator to maybe one of my favorite pieces of equipment, our Alto-Shaam.

Now an Alto-Shaam is an oven brand that is very, very highly reputed, really amazing piece of equipment.

Also terrifyingly expensive, typically.

So something that I would never have been able to afford were I not able to find this actually brand new on one of their auctions.

Let's keep going.

Now, refrigeration is really important in hospitality and restaurants and retail.

We use a lot of refrigeration and that can be really, really expensive, especially when you start adding up how many thousands of dollars every one of these pieces is.

So by being able to work with TAGeX and by being able to get some refrigeration from them, it's really helped our business to be able to get things that we can afford, but also really to kind of reduce the environmental impact by keeping things out of landfills and out of scrap metal yards.

Also, one of my other favorite pieces is this beautiful Berkel Slicer.

Came from them as well.

And then lastly, we're in our production kitchen.

So this is one of the kitchens that we do a lot of our preps.

Almost everything that you see in here has also been reclaimed from their warehouses and their auctions.

So from our refrigeration to our service fridge to little panini press as well as our convection oven and all of the tables, most of the racks and things like that.

So it's been really amazing working with them and we absolutely love to be able to repurpose these things and ultimately to be able to get better technology to allow us to be more efficient here in our restaurants and really kind of dial in what we do.

Christopher, How is the need for climate friendly practices in food related industries reflected in your work?

So we here in the Finger Lakes are in a cool ish wet region and most wine around the world these days is moving towards drier places.

And there's a lot of talk about sustainability, whether we're talking about biodynamics or organics that are really focusing on your inputs.

So your spray materials, how much are you spraying, whether it's whether it's herbicides, pesticides, fungicides, and then how are you amending your soils?

Are you doing that with chemical inputs?

Are you doing that with natural inputs?

And there's a ton of that talk, and that's where everybody is really focused on sustainability.

there are certainly some things that we all want to reduce our inputs in those pesticides, herbicides, fungicides, but especially in a place like this, fungicides are a really important thing.

Like things rot here, things go bad here.

It's quite wet.

And so we always focus on that in sustainability today in wine.

But the problem is, is that that leads people to think, okay, places that are drier are better for wine production because you don't have to spray as much.

The challenge is, is that places that are drier for wine production are on fire like California is burning.

Argentina has no water for agriculture because the Andes have no snow anymore.

Australia drained their major water sources and has no water and then caught on fire because of it.

And so when we really look at this idea of sustainability, I think again, it's like we often times focus on this like dogmatic little thing and then forget the bigger picture for me, essentially my biggest project right now is really looking at technology for the future and how we can really be much more.

Or maybe I should have said much less impactful right, while still having the impacts that we intend.

Yes.

Let's turn to Dan Johnson.

So Dan is a professor and chair of the Department of Packaging and Graphic Media Science for the College of Engineering Technology at Rochester Institute of Technology.

so from a lay perspective, it does seem like food packaging really only comes to our attention or my attention really when it fails, right?

So can you talk a little bit about balancing the consumer demand for less packaging and It was not for my dogs.

They love it.

with this concern for protecting food from spoiling?

Yeah, it's really about doing packaging correctly.

Right.

Because you don't want to over package things and waste that packaging material and you don't want to under package things and then lose the product.

In a lot of studies they show that that net energy of putting like a loaf of bread on your table, about 10% of that is tied up in the packaging.

The other 90% is all the farming and production and processing and transportation that goes into creating that product and getting it to your house.

Right.

And so what's interesting is if you do that 10% part wrong, you'll lose the 100%.

Right.

And so we usually focus on protecting the product first and then looking at what's the minimum amount of packaging we can use to do that.

Welcome to the Cornell Food Venture Center pilot Plant.

This is where we work with entrepreneurs and producers to make sure their products are safe and they are ready to meet the demands of the marketplace.

We work with many entrepreneurs, farmers, processors, through the many years that the Food Venture center has been in operation, we look at the formulation, we look at the characteristics of the product and what kind of equipment they will need.

And you can start in a very small scale with techniques that we can certainly recommend.

Here at the pilot plant at the Cornell Food Venture Center, we have all the equipment and all the techniques that these manufacturers may need to try and develop their products before they start bringing making them to bring to market.

As food scientists, when we look at the design or the development of a food product, we are concerned about many characteristics of the product.

Of course, it has to taste good, he has to be nutritious.

But we also worry about how long that product's going to be good for.

So that's the shelf stability of the product.

One of the main concerns of the food industry is food waste.

Depending on how you measure it, up to 50% of the food we produce actually goes to waste and we want to avoid that.

Packaging helps, but in general, if you want a product to last a very long time, you need to use special packaging that will not fall apart during the shelf life of the product.

Every single product that is brought to market has a lifecycle analysis attached to it, and those are not simple to measure.

Even scientists debate what is the best way to determine accurately the impact of a product on the environment.

Yeah, it has become more and more a part of the research these days to make sure that we have a life cycle analysis that will address those issues because the processing and packaging are important, but also the implications for the environment.

That's also very important.

Sustainability comes in many different ways.

A new technology has emerged and it is called high pressure processing.

And so high pressure processing, instead of applying heat to kill microorganisms, we're applying very large amounts of pressure.

So think about the bottom bottom of the ocean and maybe 3 to 5 times more than that.

So what does that do?

This amount of pressure is going to disrupt the structure of the vegetative cells or pathogens and microorganisms, and therefore they'll die.

And in order to be able to apply high pressure processing, we need to also be conscious about the type of packaging we can use.

Because you can imagine that much pressure you are going to actually compress, whatever is in it, it was the liquid.

And if there is a little bit of air, the air in the package.

Can you imagine that if you have something that is rigid, it will break this metal or glass.

So you need a flexible package in the one that works really well is package like these.

You'll see it in the marketplace a lot in cold pressed juices and also some of the hummus and salsas and dips.

So when you look at the extended shelf life that you have, you can see it based on the expiration date.

It's months typically 3 to 4 months.

That is really, really good in order to be able to market the product and for consumers to use the product over time.

In our industry, we're always looking at ways to create innovation, especially to add more sustainable packaging for consumers.

So if there's a new material that is going to give us the same functionality, but it's going to give us better recyclability or better compost ability after a certain amount of months, that is something that we're always looking to test and to evaluate.

So aside from less packaging, what should people be concerned with regarding packaging?

What should we look out for if we want to have something that is more environmentally sound?

Well, definitely look for that recycling symbol.

Okay.

And then take the time to figure out what you're supposed to do with it.

How many times do you see people when they've got like a bag of shredded cheese, they tear the entire top off of it and ignore the fact that there's a zip seal at the top that they could use to reseal the cheese, actually protect the cheese and get to use all of it.

one of the most critical things in packaging is to make the product understandable to a person.

Right?

Because if somebody can't effectively do something with that product, whatever the kind of product is.

Yeah.

And it goes to waste.

That's really where we want to watch out.

So if you want to talk about packaging, I'd be remiss if I didn't mention something there is also a component to packaging that goes beyond environmental but goes to stigma and sales, which is that we can package things in much more intelligent ways.

But if at the end of the day that isn’t adopted and isn't purchased, that package is useless.

So there's a ton of focus on the massive amount of glass that is produced by the wine industry, and there's a lot of discussions about how we like enforce deposits, how we make sure that that glass gets back to the specific winery reuse, which on small scale is going to be disastrous for people.

And the real answer to this problem isn't how we reuse the glass.

It is to stop using the glass.

And when we look at something like wine for 99% of the wines consumed in in the world today, bag and box technology is such a better such a better package.

But we won't go to it.

Why?

Because it won't sell.

so aside from you're going to pick this bottle of beautiful wine up and you're going to cellar it for 30 years, don't buy bag and box for that.

But like you're going to buy a bottle of wine on your way home from work and drink it tonight.

Buy a box of wine.

It's a better package now.

Most times the wine in the package may not be a better wine today, but that isn't to say that it couldn't be and it shouldn't be.

But, you know, I think there's a real thing to consider and it's a real hard thing for like producers, because there's a lot of equally fine ways to consume wine that doesn't require the massive amount of byproduct that it currently does.

But getting buy in is really hard, and I'm sure I just think about the wine industry, but I'm sure it's the same in the liquor industry.

I'm sure it's the same in kombucha industry.

Yeah.

let's dig into each of your work in a bit more of a granular way.

So, Neal, tell me a little bit more about the impacts, both environmental and economic, that TAGeX has achieved through its circular economy model.

And by the way, what is a circular economy model?

Well, there's a professor here and a master sommelier and world class chef.

And there's Neal Sherman.

I know there's Neil Sherman, but the circular economy basically in my mind, I've got a professor here.

I wasn't the best student.

So is to basically take a piece of equipment and continue to find a new life to it.

So it, you know, is produced then it's used by the first user, then it's displaced due to some lifecycle event closure, remodel restructuring of the offering, and then we come in to play and take it and clean it, redeploy it to another location or offer it in the aftermarket, the benefit to the subsequent user is both first to the primary user.

Instead of paying for disposition a landfill or paying somebody to dispose of it, which usually means a landfill, we pick it up and offer it in our marketplace and the benefit to the subsequent user, which there happens to be one here who's a world class chef who had the number one restaurant in America five years ago.

You must be talking about Christopher next to you.

I'm talking about Christopher next to me.

FLX in my hometown of Geneva, New York.

He you know, he's a tinkerer.

I mean, you can ask him what he does with equipment.

What do you do?

What do you do with the aftermarket equipment that you tinker with?

Well, I was late coming here because I was elbow deep in a convection oven deciding whether I wanted to fix it or go on to his site and buy another one.

Oh, I see.

I fixed it.

Yeah.

Okay.

Okay.

Well, so there are a lot of things to consider when you're talking about a circular Price as well, by the way.

Tell me more about that.

So the price, you know, it's just like anything else, the price in the aftermarket can be between $0.05 on the new dollar to call it $.30, $0.40 on the new dollar.

So if you're an independent restaurant and now chains have much more adapted in recent years the reuse of equipment that we provide and they lower their cost of capital equipment, which is a huge expense for a restauranteur or, you know, supermarket, see store food service operator, that whole infrastructure, the average restaurant has somewhere between $200,000 and $1,000,000 worth of equipment.

So if you can save 50% on 50% of that, that's 25% of the budget.

Professor, that's good math, right?

Did I just do that right?

Christopher, you have your hand up.

Yes.

Yeah.

So if I can throw into that also, you know, from a financial aspect.

So I spend a lot of time thinking about efficiency and equipment and also efficiency and labor, but also energy usage and one of the many challenges is, is that typically the equipment I really want that achieves great efficiency is way out of my small town budget and the equipment that is typically more accessible and from a price point specifically is often times hugely inefficient, not only in the fact that it wastes a ton of energy, but also in the fact that it breaks and I have to fix it or replace it again really soon.

So specifically actually outfitting a few of our locations from Neil's shops, it's really allowed me to buy a equipment I would have never been able to afford before.

That is far more efficient for my needs, far more efficient from an energy standpoint, and it's going to be longer lasting.

And it's also then left me with additional money that allowed me to look into other efficiencies.

So even if it wasn't something that I was able to buy, if I could pick up this, you know, for a significant discount, I just have more money in my budget to spend it more smartly on like the efficiency stuff that I really needed.

how did climate friendly practices in the food service industry vary globally and how can we learn from international practices?

So if you're doing packaging correctly, you're actually matching the packaging that you're using to the supply chain that you're in, right?

And so restaurants look for something, look for things differently than the rest of the world does, right?

So the kind of things that you would use in your house are just incredibly annoying in a restaurant format, right?

If you think about just bringing in sauce or like.

You and the sauce.

Yeah, I know it's hard if you're bringing in something just like salad dressing.

In a lot of cases, that’ll arrive to a restaurant in about a gallon plastic jug.

Right.

And that was just traditional.

Right.

And people just accepted that as a solution for a long, long time.

They're really annoying because you can't get all the product out of there and they're gigantic.

So when it's empty, it's clogging up your perfect kitchen.

Right?

And so they're problematic.

And so a lot of those things have moved to different pouch based solutions where you can actually use all the product.

And then when you're done with it, the what's left over is very small and compact, right?

Or for labor saving kinds of activities, right.

So if you think about just going out for chicken wings and you got those little ramekins, is that the right term?

Little ramekins of blue cheese, right.

Can you imagine trying to create 100 of those?

Right.

And how annoying it would be to kind of scoop in, right?

Different kind of solutions that you can use with packaging to fill those quickly.

Right.

To take labor out of it.

And so from a restaurant standpoint, if they're talking to their suppliers about what things they're really looking for, they can help to drive the process of getting that packaging tuned to what their needs are.

All right.

We have a call from Venice in Rochester, who works in agriculture and has some comments that Venice wants to share.

Venice, thank you so much for calling Environmental Connections.

What brings you here?

Yeah, um, I just wanted to mention I heard you guys talking about environmental distribution within Rochester and I wanted to say that from a restaurant standpoint, a really great way to get that connection from supplier or grower to the person that's demanding the vegetables is an organization called Headwater Food Hub that I worked for a bit, and they do a lot of getting vegetables from Amish farmers, from all different farmers across New York and distributing them to places and restaurants within the Rochester area.

Which is just a cool connection to kind of dig into a little bit.

They do a lot of really great work.

I know that their work has kind of changed and shifted as we have kind of changed and shifted and adapted within our food system.

But definitely a really cool thing to connect out, connect with.

Another really great way to get local food to yourself, but isn't a market or a grocery store is a CSA box and I'll go ahead and just kind of like put out there and advertise that I worked for Growing Family Farms for a while and we do CSA boxes that people can sign up for now.

And then you'll be having vegetables that you'll pick up and get every week for the rest of the summer.

Thank you so much for sharing that.

So I see you nodding.

Dan and I too have definitely been a member of a CSA many times, but obviously that's something that varies a lot based on where you are and what season you're in.

And I'm just wondering if that's something that could provide like a global solution regarding packaging or is it too variable?

It is tricky.

And there are there is starting to be packaging equipment that you can use at a smaller scale.

Right.

And so a lot of farmers are upscaling be able to actually create product, packaged product right at their location.

Right.

And so then you've got kind of the best of both worlds because you can you can handle the transportation piece because the product is packaged, but you're not sort of transporting it all around.

As a person who is intrigued by A.I., to be frank, how technology is going to impact this moving forward.

Do you have any thoughts on that?

So Amazon was at one of our career fairs a couple of years ago.

Yeah.

And they were asking our packaging science students if they had taken a coding course very intrigued by, to be frank, like and this was confusing them at first.

Right.

And what they're doing, though, is they will actually use A.I.

to scrub all the product comments that are on their site to look for comments about packaging, and then they'll feed that data back to the supplier.

Right.

And so they're trying to improve the packaging by, scrubbing that data, looking for any consumer insights that you can find.

I like that.

That is a wrap on today's deep dive into the world of sustainable food practices.

A huge thanks to my guests once again for starting this incredible discussion about something that we will continue to talk about.

It is clear that whether you're managing a restaurant or swirling a wine glass or packaging up the future, teaching the next wave of chefs climate friendly isn't just a buzzword.

It is a recipe for a healthier planet.

And remember, the power to change lies within each of us.

I'm Jasmin Singer.

Until next time, keep making those environmental connections.