Diverting Food Waste from an Urban Public University

Virginia Commonwealth University (VCU) seeks to become a national model at reducing food waste by:

1. Systemically tracking cafeteria waste to inform decisions and encourage sustainable habits within VCU dining halls
2. Diverting surplus food to sensor-enabled community refrigerators
3. Educating others to inform change 

VCU is an urban public institution with about 30,000 students. Research from my colleagues have documented that about 35% of our student population deals with food insecurity on some level. During the pandemic, I decided to start trying to do something about that. I was inspired by the Little Free Pantry movement, which borrows heavily from the Little Neighborhood Library movement. Little Free Pantries are decentralized, anonymous food pantry boxes where people in need can obtain non-perishable food and toiletry items. Often these boxes are restocked by homeowners, neighborhood groups, churchs, or similar groups.

The VCU Ram Pantry—named after our mascot Rodney the Ram—is an established program that exists to mitigate food insecurity, but its hours of operation, student class scheduling conflicts, and its location on campus made the pantry inaccessible to some students. Beginning in 2021, my team and I have deployed 12 Little Ram Pantries across both VCU campuses to meet the needs of more food insecure students. Students can anonymously access shelf-stable foods like boxed pasta, canned veggies, and bags of rice, 24 hours a day, seven days a week (as long as the buildings are open).

The faculty and student engineers on my team built a sensor network into the pantries. These sensors record timestamp data when people open the pantry doors, which we use as a proxy variable for usage. We are in the process of publishing the promising results from this initial pilot! At the beginning of the Fall 2024 semester, we expanded the Ram Pantries concept and deployed our first community fridge, or Ram Fridge, to our campus. As we expand the Ram Fridges, we will start stocking produce and refrigerated goods into the fridges. 

Reducing food waste on campus is a priority in our recently released One VCU Sustainability Plan. As part of that, VCU Dining Services recently committed to reducing and diverting food waste out of Shafer Dining Hall, our all-you-can-eat cafeteria. This grant will help to make that a reality! Faculty and student engineers on our team will build a scanner system to track post-consumer plate waste from this dining hal. This data will allow our kitchens to sometimes prepare less food! 

However, there will always be some extra food left over from an all-you-can-eat cafeteria, and at our scale that is potentially a lot of food that might be thrown into the dumpster! So, VCU Dining is committed to diverting some of that food into our expanding network of Ram Fridges. That way, hungry students can grab a container of carrots or macaroni and cheese on their way to class or before they take a test, to sustain them during the day. Other engineers on our team are adapting and improving our pantry sensor network to also collect usage data for our Ram Fridges. They will also install inward facing cameras into the Ram Fridges, allowing us to see the contents of the fridges. This data will allow for inventory control, as well as allowing us to watch for usage patterns.

Once we get this diverse system figured out on campus, we intend to expand off campus by partnering with the Richmond region’s community fridge network (RVA Community Fridge), which operates 14 community fridges across the region, and two older adult living facilities associated with the VCU health system.