Re-imagining Food Waste Reduction Across Seattle
Challenge
Seattle is a neighborhood-oriented city, and local businesses are natural community gathering spaces that can help promote a common message, build greater awareness, and initiate actions to reduce waste. But they wanted to test that notion and engage the Seattle community with intentionality to ensure impact.
In 2024, Seattle Public Utilities wanted to explore how food businesses and other commercial entities and community organizations could help consumers reduce food waste by positioning food as a way of building community and fostering cultural connections.
Implementation
Using a human-centered design strategy, the Global Impact Collective team of James Bernard, Judith Hochhauser Schneider, and Cady Susswein partnered with SPU to host a series of workshops and listening sessions to answer six major questions:
Test the notion of food as a community connector.
Determine whether businesses can serve as messengers to consumers, and conversely, whether consumers can influence businesses to prevent food from going to waste.
Isolate root causes of food waste and identify community strengths in combatting it.
Understand the systems at play in the Seattle community surrounding food and food waste and incorporate learnings.
Identify the people and organizations critical to solving the problem of food waste.
Define the role that SPU could play and envision partnerships and/or opportunities that could be used to bring communities together to prevent food waste.
Project Initiation and Planning
The Global Impact Collective believes that a strong project management foundation leads to clearer communications and effective alignment with our clients and partners. We follow Project Management Institute’s five phases of the project lifecycle (planning, initiation, execution, monitoring and closure), combined with agile best practices to organize and track our work. As part of our project initiation and planning, GIC met with SPU to discuss project objectives, gain alignment on deliverables and schedule, gather research materials, understand internal stakeholders, define ways of working, and establish regular meeting cadences. By starting with an open and honest communications forum, we successfully collaborated with SPU on a complicated project that involved engaging numerous stakeholders.
Desk Research
Following the project initiation, we conducted a desk review of internal SPU documents, including previous programs, strategic plans, and other key assets. We also explored similar municipal programs in the US and Europe. Desk research helps avoid presupposing solutions before we understand the full context of the situation.
Stakeholder Kick Off
Next, the Global Impact Collective hosted a broader kickoff workshop for SPU leadership and relevant stakeholders to crowdsource expert knowledge around pain points and potential solutions in food waste prevention as well as important players to engage in this space. As a result of the workshop, the Global Impact Collective created a list of diverse business, community leaders, and influencers to reach out to in listening sessions and focus groups. We mapped the list to a set of diversity criteria to ensure we were achieving geographic, socioeconomic, cultural, racial and age diversity in our outreach.
Collecting the Data
Reaching culturally diverse participants was a major focus of this work. We spoke with over 100 individuals from more than 30 businesses, restaurants, grocery stores, hotels, associations, community organizations, and more. Our conversations represented diverse neighborhoods and communities across the city with 45% of participants representing BIPOC communities. This engagement set the stage for future engagement as SPU considered programmatic and partnership possibilities.
Synthesizing the Data
Collecting sufficient data is important, but the synthesis of the data and the stories it generates is what truly creates value. We heard incredible stories about how food heals, how food inspires, and how food creates meaning. The Global Impact Collective distilled the listening sessions into a 20-page final report. The report answered the six questions we posed at the outset of the project and offered a pathway forward for SPU to implement programs and design a partnership model that was simple, clear, and actionable.
This included ideas for a number of activations such as grants for food waste prevention activities and public messaging, food waste prevention-integrated curriculum for cooking classes, hyper-local communities of practice to change the culture and narrative around food waste, and public food-saving events around pivotal moments such as the World Cup or community-driven farmers markets. This list goes on.
Insights to Action Workshop
As a bookend to the kickoff workshop, the Global Impact Collective facilitated an interactive final workshop with SPU to brief internal leaders and stakeholders on our findings and use design-thinking techniques to generate breakthrough ideas based on our findings. Participants valued both the kickoff and closing workshops, describing them as inclusive, informative, and interactive.
Impact
Ultimately, our work showed that food could indeed serve as a connector, and that food businesses wanted to serve as leaders on food waste in the community, but bandwidth for such leadership was low due to razor-thin margins across the industry.
Large, anchor businesses within the Seattle area (i.e. Amazon, Starbucks, Google, Microsoft, etc.) could fill a leadership role because their approaches to food waste inform behaviors for many Seattle-based employees. However, they need clear, strategic direction on how to drive engagement.
For consumers, on the other hand, participants identified lack of culturally relevant food, lack of connection to where food comes from, and lack of knowledge about the impact of food waste on the environment and our wallets as major potential causes of food waste. This work set the stage for further study and SPU’s implementation phase for programs and partnerships.
Read the final case study here.
