From improved inventory management to composting, restaurants can deploy multiple strategies to reduce food waste, says Afterlife Ag cofounder Winson Wong. In practice, however, "the vast majority of this food is still going to landfills," he says.
New York-based Afterlife Ag (tagline: 'Don't let waste go to waste') originally attempted to tackle this problem through setting up a hyper-local composting network, but gradually changed course, says Wong, who started the company (then known as Peat) in 2021 with Sierra Alea and Ryan Freed. "Composting is challenging. It requires a lot of space, it's very manual, and it's a lot of work. The reality is that if it delivered a really good return, people would be a lot more invested in it."
The three then pivoted to a more creative solution: using the food scraps they were struggling to compost from restaurants and using them as a substrate to grow gourmet mushrooms that they could then sell back to chefs, creating a circular solution.
"A lot of investors asked me why doesn't anyone else do this [use food waste as a substrate in commercial mushroom farming]? Probably because no one's dumb enough to do it," he says. "But our goal was not to build a mushroom farm, but to figure out what to do with food waste, so we're coming at this from a different angle. We're trying to figure out how to make food waste more valuable.
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