NEW YORK (FPS) On November 14th, the New York City Mayor’s Office of Food Policy (MOFP) and the NYC Department of Sanitation (DSNY) hosted their event, Maximizing Food: Designing Systems to Utilize Surplus. Panelists and attendees were drawn from the City’s most prominent policy makers and influencers.
Maximizing Food was designed to provide insight into the future of New York City’s produce distribution and organic waste management initiatives over the next four years. The MOFP also gave participants a chance to discuss the difficulties associated with food surplus distribution (As in: perfectly edible produce and prepared food with nowhere to go) in breakout groups after listening to the speakers. The event was held during the transition to the administration of mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani, who will take office on January 1, 2026.
Executive Director of the MOFP Kate MacKenzie, who delivered the opening remarks, positioned the MOFP and the DSNY—and their cooperation with one another as well as with policy influencers—as being crucial to solving the hunger problem in the City. As MacKenzie reported, 25 percent of the children in New York City are food insecure, a rate that is significantly higher than the national average of 13.5 percent.
Together, the two agencies proposed a symbiotic relationship, with the MOFP focused on getting New Yorkers fed while the DSNY investigated the ways in which food we were throwing out could be given another chance. Effectively, members of the DSNY were to be repositioned as more than just the people who pick up trash and compost and, instead, as those who keep track of how inefficient food waste systems in the City really are.
One of MacKenzie’s most significant pieces of news concerned the complete redesign of the Hunts Point Cooperative Market in the South Bronx, where a large portion of food begins its journey to the supermarkets, bodegas, restaurants, and private homes throughout the City. This means it is also the place where New York’s food waste issue originates. Hunts Point moves nearly 4.5 billion pounds of food a year and is the largest food distribution center in the world. However, it was built in the mid-20th century, and its facilities are outdated, overburdened, and wasteful. The redesign, which is scheduled to take place over the course of the Mamdani administration, will be an opportunity to rethink how hunger can be alleviated in the City.
MacKenzie also asked the audience to consider how we might overhaul the City’s strict food safety guidelines to encourage the safe distribution of prepared foods. A plan to distribute surplus that is more than just fruits, vegetables, or other raw ingredients would be beneficial for those who don’t have access to a kitchen or time to cook (For example, students, disabled individuals, or parents).
She called for a much-needed “circular” food system in New York. And while she did not provide a precise definition of the term, the implication was that it would be a system in which resources are reused and food production, consumption, and waste are all environmentally sustainable and regenerative.
One of the ways to make a food system more sustainable is to change the way we look at waste and how much of what we throw away is still edible. The MOFP and DSNY acknowledged that the biggest changes must start at the top, where government and industry intersect—at the policy level—because, in fact, the food industry is responsible for more than half of the food waste in the United States.
Maximizing Food, the First Panel
The first panel was hosted by Milagros de Hoz, the Director of Policy and Strategy at the MOFP. Those invited included Jennifer McDonnell, Deputy Commissioner of Solid Waste Management Planning at the DSNY, Lisa Weingarten, Vice President of Portfolio Management at the NYC Economic Development Corporation, Stefanie Katzman, CEO of the Katzman produce distribution company, Evan Ehlers, Founder and Executive Director of Sharing Excess, and Krietta Marley, Co-founder and Vice President of Product Development of the Foodprint Group.
This panel provided insight into the most basic methods of and necessities for redesigning a food waste management system—particularly one that would fit New York’s size and scale as well as the discerning palates of its residents, who are regularly exposed to a wide variety of cuisines.
The panelists had a few suggestions for how to tackle the city’s food waste issue. Some—such as Marley’s idea to provide more transparent waste “tracking,” because food waste is a “hidden” or intentionally obscured issue—were quite simple. She noted most people, especially food handlers like chefs and farmers, do not have a quantifiable scale of food waste in this country. Marley suggested we need a kind of policy that would make the transparency of food waste more accessible.
Others, like Weingarten, pointed to the fact that our storage and distribution facilities are environmentally harmful. Refrigeration emits tonnes of greenhouse gases (GHGs), and Hunts Point’s system, built in the 1970s, is inefficient relative to the amount of food needed to feed New Yorkers. Weingarten wanted to make Hunts Point into a place that set the example for food distribution centers worldwide.
Katzman and Ehlers had more daunting solutions to the problem of waste and hunger. Katzman saw it as a “logistics” issue. As CEO of a century-old produce distributor inside Hunts Point, she wanted the audience to realize how difficult it is to get food from point A to point B, especially in a city where point B is, in actuality, 8.5 million mouths with different preferences, locations, and budgets.
“Consumers want year-round produce,” Katzman said, frustrated. She pointed to the fact that waste starts with education, which would include the understanding that the normalization of consistency in our grocery stores and restaurants is contributing to a damaged environment and generating unnecessary surplus. (And that while we still have that excess, we might as well give it to those who need it most.)
Then, she continued, there is the cost of distribution. You might be able to successfully navigate the logistics of getting excess food where it needs to go, but now you need to find the money to distribute it. Additionally, there is a need to provide an incentive or motivation to not waste edible meals and produce in the first place. And New York City has a lot of food and waste. Katzman noted that New York has one and a half days’ worth of food in the City at all times, and not all of it is consumed.
Marley also expressed the need for education about seasonal produce and environmentally-conscious consumption. She suggested New York restaurants should try to adopt a “European model of selling out,” where eateries buy and produce less food in an attempt to have less waste at the end of the day. Customers would have to get used to a culture of eating where dishes and produce they eat on a regular basis would become available only at certain times of the year or for a certain amount of time during the day (As in: more lunch and holiday specials). She alluded to how a lot of America’s food culture and system is catered to a desire of abundance and plethora. However, she said, policy will inform what businesses do as they cannot always be trusted to find incentives to reduce waste themselves (For example, limiting the amount of out-of-season vegetables sold in the winter).
“We need as many solutions, policies, at once,” Ehlers said. He imagined a New York City government flexible enough to “scale” policies and “in a span of twenty-four hours or less.” This meant that said policies should be able to work efficiently, whether they serve only a neighborhood or the entire City, and could be implemented within a day of approval from the mayor’s office. Although the Sharing Excess founder’s ideas appeared ambitious, he was intent on just getting the ball rolling in the mayor’s office. Effectively, he said, trying a few policies that sort of work is better than having a bunch of concepts and not putting them into action at all.
Katzman applauded Ehlers for his work with the Philadelphia Wholesale Produce Market, and, in general, what many of the panelists had in common was their desire to consult and learn from other communities around the world. The consensus seemed to be that we need not waste the time, in addition to the food, trying to think-tank or consult our way out of this issue when other cities have already found creative ways to tackle hunger and leftovers at the same time.
Surplus in Service
The second panel was hosted by Alissa Westervelt, Senior Manager of donateNYC at the DSNY, and those who were invited included Ora Kemp, Senior Policy Advisor at the MOFP, Asmeret Berhe-Lumax, CEO and Founder of the One Love Community Fridge, Richard Cumming, CEO and Founder of the Foodstream Network, Anna Hammond, CEO and Founder of Matriark Foods, and Jessica Ng, COO at Rescuing Leftover Cuisine.
Westervelt began the panel with a remark about the DSNY’s donateNYC food portal, an online resource for businesses and organizations to donate and receive excess food. Much of the second panel’s discourse echoed that of the first: a need for change in both education and policy to be instituted as quickly as possible. However, this group went into more detail about what the specific policies should look like based on their “boots on the ground” experience.
Kemp pictured policy as something that “connects dots.” She saw policymakers as those responsible for considering “upstream” (government and its intentions) and “downstream” (stakeholders and their behaviors) factors in the “supply chain” of any legislation. Berhe-Lumax agreed, stating how important it is for those who will ultimately be most affected to play a part in the solution.
Ng shifted attention to the taboo and discomfort surrounding the receipt of upcycled or donated food. She noted that there were fewer legal restrictions than one might think related to reusing leftover food. Whether it was the shame that may come from receiving a plastic bag full of free produce or discomfort at the thought of eating products made from undesirable vegetables, surplus had become, on the one hand, celebrated as an indicator of a fruitful food chain or a wealthy society, while, on the other hand, people struggled to consume said excess. And this was true despite some of upcycling’s evidence-backed benefits, such as those suggested by Hammond, that if the City were to require a certain percentage of contracted food (for example: meals in schools, hospitals, and some government buildings) to be certified upcycled it could divert millions of tons of excess from landfills.
Cumming saw downstream food redistribution as “chaos.” His organization, the Foodstream Network, relies heavily on technology to connect donated food with recipients as soon as the food becomes available, and his work is “unpredictable” in terms of both who is willing or able to donate and who needs assistance.
Berhe-Lumax stated that technology was a way to solve the problem of food waste by making that food more accessible to the everyday person. Being able to pick up or receive food should not be different from using a service such as Seamless or Uber Eats. And she also expressed concern that a meal-delivery service, if left unregulated, would lean toward putting profit over people.
Similarly, Ng highlighted the chaos surrounding the way organizations are paid (or not paid) to redistribute food. She said that many people do not believe we ought to pay for food recovery, but forget that both labor and logistics have gone into its transportation and delivery. People don’t want to pay for upcycled or redistributed food because they see it as waste, trash, or something humiliating, such as food scraps. Part of reimaging surplus must include moving away from calling still-edible produce and prepared food “waste” and referring to it as something more in line with “excess.”
Perhaps one of the most contentious propositions made by the panel was Kemp’s idea to use mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani’s proposed city-owned grocery stores as testing grounds for redistributing upcycled food and would-have-been food waste. She reimagined the grocery stores as a trial space for trying out food-related policies and initiatives in addition to simply providing affordable groceries, which was their original intent.
“Policy” Breakout Group
The Food Policy Center participated in the “policy and advocacy” breakout group facilitated by the Associate Director of Advocacy at City Harvest, Steven Deheeger. The FPC was joined by other policy influencers, such as a chef in charge of designing New York’s public school lunch menus, a policy maker who worked on Los Angeles’s food waste recycling law SB 1383, members of the New York chapter of the Food Waste Action Network, and members of the MOFP and DSNY’s own teams, among others.
The breakout group worked more or less like a roundtable discussion. The MOFP provided the policy-related questions, which were posed by Deheeger, and to which we responded by offering our opinions and insights. In that sense, it was not unlike a miniature, informal think-tank.
We started out by listing policies at the local and state levels that could be expanded to include the donation of excess food instead of letting it go to waste. Participants brought up the City’s Local Law 57 (2021), which requires city agencies with food procurement contracts to be held accountable for reducing food waste by producing an annual report (although they do not necessarily divert surplus from landfills). Then we discussed the recent mandatory separation of compost from trash to convert food scraps into renewable energy. One participant even brought up California’s new Food Date Labeling Bill AB 660, which bans the use of “sell by dates” on commercial packaging for consumers.
The mention of the Food Date Labeling Bill turned the discussion toward the definitions of food safety, preventing donation, and the legal and cultural restrictions that determine when food is no longer fit for consumption. The City’s Department of Health, for example, prevents surplus food donations to NYC public schools, to these institutions. The group expressed a desire to rebalance food safety policy versus practicality. While the laws about prepared food’s time and temperature may keep us safe, the group felt that they are also responsible for generating a significant amount of waste. Policy, as one participant concluded, should be made to benefit humans, not bureaucracy.
One of the most widely criticized bills was New York State’s Food Donation and Food Scraps Recycling Law, which was criticized because it applies everywhere in the state but New York City. (The City follows its own previously cited local law). In areas outside of the City, there is a donation step before composting that businesses and institutions must follow, but New York State does not check to determine whether or not donated food is still edible (something California’s donation laws require, according to one participant).
When it came to policies New York City has yet to implement, tax incentives were among the most popular. A tax cut would provide a financial incentive for more businesses and institutions to get on board with curbing surplus. The concept was to give a certain amount of money back to those who reported donating excess, perhaps in a way that would be similar to how these kinds of tax incentives work in some European countries.
The FPC suggested that passage of the proposed New York Bill S2062, which seeks to establish a right to food in New York State, would be a good way to prevent excess from going to waste. Ideally, if the State were required to feed New Yorkers, perhaps by any means necessary, the state government would be able to take advantage of the millions of pounds of surplus that would otherwise be thrown out.
The group also discussed factors that need to change in order to “operationalize” the above policies and laws in New York City. One was getting the City to cooperate with non-profit organizations (For example, the New York Food Waste Action Network, policy consultants, et cetera). Another was fundraising and money. Despite the fact that food surplus is unwanted, people must be paid to provide the logistics and labor involved in transporting and disposing of it.
The one factor almost everyone agreed on was education. The consensus was that eliminating waste preferably starts when young children are taught why food waste is bad (Such as it harms the environment or could be feeding those who are underserved) and how we can prevent it (Such as donating surplus, eating leftovers, or using all parts of an animal or vegetable). And, unlike non-profit cooperation and fundraising, education is reliant on policy for implementation.
In Conclusion
The MOFP and the DSNY provided an opportunity for food policy experts to convene and consider not just what is produced, but what happens after consumption. A potential next step for this discussion would be to convene a group of ordinary New Yorkers instead of experts and policy influencers. Now that we have heard what the professionals think, if we want to make policies that help people, we ought to hear from the people we want to help.
That said, however, the MOFP and the DSNY did give us some important insight into what Mamdani’s administration will have to deal with regarding hunger and waste in the City. The panel synthesized many of the thoughts and theories surrounding excess and reminded us that food policy doesn’t stop at what we feed ourselves with, but must also take into consideration what we don’t or can’t eat.
A correction was made on December 29, 2025: Because of an editing error, the FPC misattributed a quote from Krietta Marley to Jennifer McDonnell about education and seasonal produce. In addition, due to an editing error, the FPC misinterpreted a statistic from Anna Hammond which should have been presented as a hypothetical.
