How Carleton’s Food Recovery Network Feeds Families and the Planet
The Food Recovery Network (FRN) is a national movement of college students who recover surplus food and donate it to local nonprofits, helping feed people in their community while reducing food waste. Carleton’s chapter of FRN is one of the best: in 2022–23, Carleton recovered 41,208 pounds of food, making up 9.3 percent of FRN’s national total—an effort that prevented the equivalent of 320 metric tons of carbon dioxide from being released in a landfill. Follow along with us on a journey of unused food, examining this innovative, student-designed process from beginning to end.
FRN’s focus is food from campus, as well as from a local grocery store. The goal is to keep excess produce and uneaten hot food and deli items out of the Rice County landfill and direct it somewhere it can be useful.
Six nights a week, student volunteers like Jonathan Nguyen ’25 and Amanda Ta ’25 meet up to track down food—either heading to Burton Hall and the Language and Dining Center to pack up leftovers from that day’s dinner or driving across town to Cub Foods to pick up unpurchased items collected by store staff.
“Thirty to 40 percent of food in the U.S. is wasted, and if not intercepted by recovery efforts, it often ends up in the landfill where it decomposes and releases methane. Methane is a potent greenhouse gas with 84 to 87 times the warming capacity of carbon dioxide over a 20-year period,” says Gwen Casey ’25, a program leader for Carleton’s FRN chapter. “Food recovery is a simple way to have a direct impact on the reduction of food insecurity and climate change at the same time.”
Unused food from the dining halls and grocery store are transported directly to places where they’re needed. Depending on the day of the week, that could be the Community Action Center (CAC) food shelf in Northfield’s Greenvale neighborhood, the Somali adult education center in Faribault, or Faribault’s Evergreen mobile home park, where Carleton students are also tutoring residents.
All rescued food—including between 900 and 1,200 pounds per week from Cub alone—is sorted and weighed by volunteers like Lucia Caputo ’27, Lejla Mehmedovic ’27, and Ruby Chan ’27. The highest quality stays at the CAC food shelf, while the rest goes to a local farm or is turned into compost.
Curbside Compost, a local youth business co-op that started collecting in 2017, donates bins to the CAC food shelf; once full, they end up at the Shakopee Mdewakanton Sioux Community Organics Recycling Facility for processing. Charged with “being a good steward of the earth,” the facility turns food waste into compost that’s then sold for commercial or personal use—some ending up in gardens or farms where it’ll help grow more food, continuing the cycle.
What about the food that’s not quite compost, but not quite fit for human consumption? No problem—farm animals love it! Jessica Page’s farm in Wanamingo, Minnesota is home to a menagerie of animals: 180 chickens (rescued when a nearby poultry processor closed), 80 goats, six beef cattle, two alpacas, and a 300-pound Hampshire pig named Helen. Twice a week she receives boxes of food reclaimed from Cub and Carleton’s dining halls, sometimes as many as two dozen. It’s a win-win: the recovered food offers a varied, healthy diet while reducing Page’s expenses, all while keeping food out of the landfill where it’ll decompose and release methane.
“The amount of food that we waste as Americans is insane. So if there’s any way that I can help use it, I’m happy to,” Page says. She uses recovered food to feed all her animals, including her dogs Leia, Luke, and Dog. “And I’ll admit that as a single mom with three kids, if we get apples, there’s usually only two bad apples in the whole bag, so the family eats a lot. I couldn’t run the farm without this kind of help.”
That just leaves the Community Action Center food shelf. A longtime partner for Carleton, the CAC gets all the fresh produce and boxed-up meal leftovers that FRN can provide. The CAC uses the Food Choice model, so it functions like a regular grocery store: just browse the shelves and take home what you’d enjoy.
FRN’s work with the CAC even goes beyond feeding families. Working with Carleton’s Center for Community and Civic Engagement (CCCE), students established a first-of-its-kind carbon offset project for the CAC using the EPA’s WARM tool, quantifying the avoided landfill methane emissions from recovered food. This project, certified by the climate action nonprofit Second Nature, allows the CAC to sell carbon credits based on the food recovery work. Carleton will purchase this inaugural round of credits to help offset its hard-to-eliminate Scope-3 emissions.
“What’s remarkable is how much of all of this is driven by students: Carleton students looked at the Food Recovery Network national model and said, ‘We’re going to do this.’ And then they expanded it to include the retail rescue,” says Erica Zweifel, assistant director for community impact at CCCE. “One of CAC’s mottoes is ‘Neighbors helping neighbors.’ It’s wonderful that Carleton can show up as neighbors and help the community. It feels tremendous to be part of it.”