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ORCA, an on-site aerobic digester designed to compost food waste in hotel or convention center kitchens, has built-in scales and software that measure and track how much food waste it’s processing.
“This is a giant stomach,” Andrew Cooper tells me, opening the shiny silver lid of the food waste digester called ORCA. “Anything that is edible goes in here.” Cooper, executive chef at La Quinta Resort & Club in Palm Springs, California, plucks out what looks like a tiny pellet from a garbled heap of lumpy food waste. The pellet is actually an enzyme that helps break down the food waste, which, along with the machine’s spinning motion, turns that waste into a liquid effluent. After a few hours of processing, that liquid eventually gets routed through the La Quinta’s water-treatment system and finally into the irrigation system, helping to keep the 45-acre resort’s landscaping in pristine shape.
La Quinta is one of many resorts, hotels, and event venues opting to add digesters like these to their catering kitchen. Among them: the newly opened Baird Center in Milwaukee, and the Edmonton EXPO Centre in Edmonton, Canada.
Executive Chef Andrew Cooper estimates that adding an ORCA to the kitchen at the La Quinta Resort & Club in Palm Springs has saved about 200,000 pounds of food waste from going to the landfill.
Convention centers’ and event venues’ “food waste volume production changes incredibly fast and very often,” said Ellie Porter, sustainability manager at ORCA. “And so that’s an environment where ORCA can work very well simply because we’re moving through food waste at a very, very quick level.” ORCA comes in different size models, and the largest — the OG100 — digests 100 pounds per hour for 24 hours. Cooper estimates that for La Quinta’s property alone, adding an ORCA to the kitchen has saved about 200,000 pounds of food waste from going to the landfill.
ORCA has been around for about 13 years, and according to Porter, they’re seeing more interest from hotels and event venues than ever before. Part of that may be due to more state laws mandating that businesses compost their organic waste. In 2022, California enacted a law (SB 1383) requiring the diversion of all food and organic waste, whether by composting, donating, or repurposing. The law has set a target of diverting three-quarters of organic waste from landfills by 2025.
Having an on-site digester means large-scale venues can often skip the labor-intensive step of moving their food waste around to comply with waste laws like SB 1383. One issue that convention centers face with a traditional composting program is the location of their kitchen, Porter said. She shared an example of a convention center client where it would take workers nearly a half-hour to move their food waste to the basement area for pickup by local collectors. “That was not only a huge cost challenge,” she said, “but a labor challenge for them.”
With an ORCA, workers simply dump their food waste into the machine which is sized appropriately to fit in a catering kitchen. In the Reels video here, chef Cooper shows the process in the catering kitchen at La Quinta:
Valérie de Robillard
Globally, hotels and venues are also increasingly looking to technologically advanced tools like digesters after the fact, as well as AI to aid them in decreasing food waste from the very start. At Accor’s Global Meeting Exchange (GME) in Paris in 2023, Accor’s senior vice president, environment & CSO coordination sustainability, Valérie de Robillard, shared that the hospitality company is heavily relying on both to reach its goal of reducing food waste by 50 percent by 2030 in line with the UN’s own Sustainable Development Goal.
During a panel session with journalists at the 2023 GME, de Robillard emphasized that getting a head start on food waste is key, as the laws and logistics of food donations vary greatly by locality. Globally, she said, in the hospitality sector, half of food waste happens during preparation and production stages, 30 percent during consumption, and 20 percent during the transportation and storage. “Our main focus is really to reduce food waste first,” she said, and then donate when necessary.
At Pullman Paris Montparnasse, a flagship property of Accor’s revamped Pullman brand and host of the GME, the 957-room hotel uses an on-site biowaste collector to turn food waste into biogas energy. Globally, Accor’s 5,000-plus hotel properties also rely on partnerships with organizations for food donations and various kinds of AI-enabled technology solutions for better tracking and data on their food-waste efforts. That includes a new program Accor helped build in collaboration with partners — Fullsoon, which is designed to track and predict consumption habits of guests at hotels and restaurants to avoid overordering food and therefore creating food waste. According to partner International Food Waste Coalition, in a trial study Fullsoon predicted attendance for the Big Mama restaurant group with 95 accuracy and orders with up to 85 percent accuracy.
Sodexo Live! has tapped the AI-enabled Leanpath platform to help control food waste at some of its partner venues. Molly Crouch, the company’s corporate director of sustainability, said that she sees a growing awareness industry-wide of the impact food waste has on the environment, and is hopeful that technology and AI will only further help the cause.
“The change in behavior is evident as these conversations are actively happening,” she said. “Event planners are more aware of the positive impact they can have on host cities. Our culinary and back-of-house teams have been focused on food waste for decades and seeing how it is now being pushed to the front-of-house consumer space is very encouraging. Is it a perfect system right now? No. But the cool part is that it’s trending in the right direction.”
Jennifer N. Dienst is senior editor at Convene.
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