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Talk: How Events Can Cut Food Waste: Measuring, Communication, and Smarter F&B Planning · PCMA Convene Podcast

• Convene Talk, ep. 94/May 1, 2026 *Note: the transcript is AI generated, excuse typos and inaccuracies Magdalina Atanassova: This is the Convene Podcast. Welcome to another Convene Talk. So, Barbara, over to you. Barbara Palmer: Thank you, Maggie. Yeah. Hello, everyone. We are talking today about our cover story, the April cover story about food waste. I looked up right before the, right before the meeting, I looked up to see what were the latest stats about food waste. And it's a very persistent problem. In the last decade, the US wastes 30% of its food supply, and 17% of that comes from food service. And the implications of that are, you know, they're really threefold. There's the environmental cost, because when you waste food, you're wasting all the energy that goes into the production and you're creating emissions that don't need to be created. There's the, the fact that food is wasted and there's so many people that need food. And that is in the US 48 million people are food insecure. And globally, of course, that number is much amplified. And then there's problem of cost. It's really risen. It's causing more pressure than it has. And the estimate for the food service industry alone is that annually food waste, food that is prepared and not eaten, is $122 billion. This issue is one that we have covered going back at least a decade in terms of trying to figure out what events can do to help solve the problem. And so I want to ask actually turn this over to Jen Deeds. She was the author of our cover story. And a lot of the things that can be done to prevent food waste or to make a dent in the amount of food waste are known. Like we did a story, it's been six or seven years ago, and all of the elements are there that we know that measuring creates a big difference. We know that changing what's on the menu, even people even knew that communication was a huge deal. But it's just been very recently, I think that all these elements have come together. And at Convening Leaders, I think Jen went to a session where all of this really got kind of pulled out in a great conversation. So I'm going to just let Jen tell us a little bit about that session and then we can talk about it. And I know Maggie also has done a series on food and has a lot of conversations about food waste. So I've just loved to hear from you, Jen, about the conversation that you heard at Convening Leaders that kind of compelled this series forward. Jen Dienst: Sure. Thanks, Barbara. Yeah. You know, this was, this was such an interesting session that I sat in on earlier this year. It was interesting one because the study that present was presented, it was presented by an organization or, I'm sorry, an initiative called the US Food Waste Pact. So that's actually a joint initiative by the World Wildlife Fund and the food waste nonprofit Refed. The name of the study was Low Waste Measuring and Reducing Food Waste and Events. It's not the first study that they've done on this topic, but it's definitely the most recent and I think it's definitely the most targeted to events. So what they did was essentially look at six business events that were held throughout last year. So what this did was take a look at six business events that were held in 2026. And they specifically looked at food waste reduction guidelines that they tested. And they partnered with some people that they knew, some event planners, some great venues and food service providers that are interested and have experience and using these types of food waste reduction guidelines so that they could really pick things apart and look and see what was the most successful at reducing food waste at these events. So there's tons of great takeaways and interesting stats and data that came out of this event, which we'll get into shortly. But I think the big like broad takeaway is that, like touching on exactly what you just said, Barbara, like we've kind of already known this. It requires active and intentional buy in from all parties involved throughout the entire event life cycle. And by all parties, I mean the venue, the food service provider like Sodexo, who participated in these pilot events, the chefs and the planners, slash the event client, if that's applicable. So they really dove into how using different strategies from beginning to end made the biggest effect and impact on reducing food waste. Also touching on what you said earlier, food waste equals wasted money. And I think right now everyone, like you said, is so super conscious about their budgets, the price of food is astronomical. And they found from this most recent study that each, if the, each of the 1.9 million business events hosted in the US annually had the same rate of uneaten food as the six events that were looked at during the study. The combined waste would total 55,000 tons of food. And that's valued at more than $330 million. So you can make the argument to, I think like, yes, there's a huge environmental impact, but there's also a monetary impact. And that we found goes, you know, affects not only the venue and the food service provider, but the planner as well. And there is an argument to be made that if you are strategic enough and work ahead enough, you could potentially save some dollars and have a better bottom line all around. So that's kind of the gist of of the story. We kind of got into the nitty gritty of some of the data and some of the strategies that were used. But you know, it was, it was really interesting to talk to all parties. I think one of the biggest takeaways was this isn't something, this isn't a goal that can be achieved by one party, AKA the chef or the venue or the planner. It takes everyone being actively involved and working together. And one of the things that I remember during this session at Convening Leaders was when they started presenting the findings of this study, some members of the audience who were planners immediately started raising their hand and asking questions and saying like, okay, these are great strategies, but we can't get our venue partners to actually work with us to implement them. How do we do that? So, and then I, you know, I heard some discussion coming from the other side in some of my interviews where the venues and the chefs and the food service providers said quite the opposite. They said, we would love to implement these strategies and reduce food waste. It's a better bottom line for us. It's a goal that we strive you. A lot of these venues are LEED certified environment. You know, their sustainability is important to them. And they said, you know, the client expectation is not there. They don't necessarily. They want, there's an abundance mindset I think is what they said and they want. You know, they have this long held kind of belief that if they run out of food, it will be like the end of the world for their event. There's a little bit of fear on both sides. There's a little bit of finger pointing on all sides. But what this study found is there are definitely inconsistencies and some ball dropping on all sides. And if they come together and kind of work together to fix that, then they can, they can move a lot closer to this goal. So I'll kind of stop there, but is if there's something that's super interesting to you guys specifically, we can jump into that. But those are the kind of the broader takeaways that I got from the study. Michelle Russell: And the story you said something about the like finger pointing and abundance. And I had a thought and I don't know where it went, but I wanted to ask Maggie because this is separate, I think, and this is not. This is more related to household food waste than it is to venue food waste. But there is this whole confusion in the United States which really contributes to food waste, which is the expiration dates. And I know Refed has been trying to. To kind of set the record straight because there's this, you know, there's sell by dates, use by dates, and some of them vary by state here. And a lot of people think that it means it's not safe if you don't eat it, consume it by a certain date. In fact, it's just that maybe the quality is a little less. And so that really. And as far as households are concerned, that really contributes to a lot of food waste. So I'm wondering how those dates are managed in other parts of the world. Magdalina Atanassova: That's a good question. And that's something I've actually really thought about. Just because I thought that's kind of universal, isn't it, that you have. Yeah, it's the first time I actually understand that it's a universal thing where you just have it equally everywhere. Michelle Russell: Yeah. Magdalina Atanassova: No, when it comes to, again, household items. Right. Because it's different. Michelle Russell: It's household. I would imagine a venue like would. I would think they would be more attuned to that just because their goal is to serve fresh food. So they would not want to serve something where the quality, even like a spice may have degraded, whereas at home is perfectly fine to use, like cinnamon. That's beyond. It's not. It's not gonna be harmful to your health. It just will not have the same potency. Maybe. But that. That's really where a lot of the food waste comes from in. Among households in the US because people just don't understand what those mean, and they just end up throwing out perfectly fine food. Yeah. Magdalina Atanassova: But, you know, speaking of that, it connects very nicely to my conversation with Refed. I spoke to their director, Community Engagement, Jacqueline Chi, and she made the same kind of parallel to explain how much the food waste in the US it was. It was. She was like. Like, you're buying. Not going to record the right amount of grocery bags. But I think she said, like, you're buying five bags and just two of them. You just stole them out. That's exactly how food waste works. And especially at events. And I think for me, it was very obvious during Convenient Leaders and how the states vary in their requirements because we had some cupcakes out for an hour and then they refused to do anything with them. They deemed them unsafe and they would throw them away unless we wanted to do something with them ourselves, which to me was just shocking because they've been out for an hour. It's a cupcake. It's they're totally safe to be eaten again. So we took them to be eaten by the staff. Right. Because we understand they're totally fine and nothing happened to them. Nobody touched them or anything. But to me, that was kind of a wow. So that abundance mindset, it came in that conversation with Jackie as well. And to me, it was like a huge shock when she said at their event, they actually are fine running out food. And that has happened. And of course, she said, we want our audience to be satiated and we want to know that everyone had eaten, but we're not afraid to see empty trays out. And that's something that I believe a lot of event planners are feeling very itchy seeing an empty tray. Also, it's something that the kitchen staff, I believe, has, as a training, as someone who has worked in a kitchen, in a hotel kitchen, and I had to service these trays. I know very well that you are actually asked if you see something that's kind of half empty to go and refill it. So it's. It's something that, like Jen said, all parties need to be kind of aligned and agree upon what's okay and what's not okay. Michelle, you had a thought? Michelle Russell: Yeah, I remembered what I wanted to ask Jen. So I'm wondering if this came up in any of your conversations. The fact that a lot of the population are on Ozempic or WeGovy and that affects their appetite, has that come up as being one of the factors that. That planners are looking at? Jen Dienst: So, you know, that specifically did not come up. However, we did talk about portion sizes and how portion sizes are definitely kind of part of the issue. But this really does. We talked about this quite a bit. This was something that I spoke about with World Wildlife Funds Pete Pearson. He had. He had some interesting things to say on this, which was that especially in the U.S. our portion sizes can just be too much and that contributes a ton to food waste. However, that really does depend on your group. So I think you can have different groups of people and their needs and their wants are different. Right. So I think what it comes down to is knowing your group and doing a really good job of seeing how much food is left on the plate or left at buffets. And there's ways to track that with audit. So you can use photo audits, you can have your own staff members. If you're a meeting planner, your own staff members actually go around and kind of take a look and see what's left and write that down. And then you can use that for ordering next time. You can also ask if your venue can kind of keep tabs on that as well. So there's some. Some advice on different ways to do that. That's not new advice. I think that's been around for a bit. But, yes, I think in general, portion sizes are too big, if you think about, you know, the number of people who are watching, you know, their diet or cutting down on portion size. But two, you have to remember, like, if you're, you know, like, what you're serving too. So if, if you have a salad bar, like, that may not be the case. Or if you have, like, healthy food, that may not be the case. But if you're serving, like, really heavy food, like, people might be eating less of it. So, yeah, we talked about that quite a bit, and it's. It's definitely part of the issue, but it comes down to knowing your audience and what they want and how much they eat and tracking it. Kate Mulcrone: So big picture, both in terms of the story, which covered so much ground and our conversation today, I'm just kind of amazed by how much this isn't a food waste problem, it's a communication problem and how we have planners and venues and, like, community organizations working alongside each other trying to solve this. But we're still seeing so much buffet food waste. And I'm hearing a lot of great ways to address this that feel genuinely new. It feels to me like both in terms of the people that Jen and Barbara talked to for the story, but also the conversation today that this is a moment when there's actual energy to tackle this issue. And I love that the approaches we're seeing are coming from every part of the industry, all kinds of people. And I feel optimistic about this problem getting solved. Barbara Palmer: I looked up the change because that is a point that Refed and the World Wildlife Fund makes, is that this is solvable. Like, this is a complicated but solvable problem. And the percentage points are not big in the context of all the food. But in the food service industry, that is where they are making strides. In 2025, I think it was like a 3.7% reduction in food waste in the food service industry, which is not just events. And I think one of the really critical things is measuring. There's a new study that came out from the International Venue association and partnership with Honeycomb and tsnn, and they just talked about how if you have those venues that have things like sustainable procurement policies, they have certifications that they track their waste data. I looked at the studies that the World Wildlife fund was doing 10 years ago. And they started out with hotel kitchens. And they said one of the biggest things, the biggest discoveries was that chefs just don't know how much food that they're wasting. And another big takeaway was that they had to train everybody. It wasn't just the people in the kitchen, it wasn't just the chefs, it was the people who were signing the sales contracts. It was the people who were, who were responding to RFPs. Like, everybody's got to be educated on what makes a difference. If venues and planners could just sit down and talk about what that represents, like what Maggie said, like not filling up the planner. But unless you have these conversations about what the expectations are and you don't have to just have the conversations between planners and venues, you can have the conversations with participants. You can like do it even at registration. Talk about how your goals for the meeting. You could talk about where the food that if you participate in food recovery. You know, I would love to go to an event and know that food that wasn't eaten was going to go to, you know, that it was going to go to a local shelter or a local neighborhood where people needed meals. And they could say, you know what? You might see some half empty platters and we've got, you know, it's not because we don't want to feed you. It's just that if we keep this food in the kitchen, if we keep it heated, we can send that to a neighborhood where somebody's going to have that for lunch. So that's why you might see some uneaten platters or, you know, just. I just think if people were able to just understand that attendees like, it's not going to ruin my experience at a meeting if there's not a full platter of fruit. To your point, Kate, about momentum, it's really there. Like, I think like planners are starting to add in their RFPs that they would like data from the kitchen. I think venues can talk to planners about what helps them. If they can just talk about this early in the process, the earlier that you talk about it and getting post event reports, if you can go through the whole life cycle, then your odds of preventing food waste go way, way up. Michelle Russell: You touched on this. But just to kind of underscore it, I think the communication, Kate, you talked about also needs to be communication. Barbara, to your point, with the stakeholders, with the participants, with the attendees. So there was a session at Convening Leaders. It was a convene session, came from a story that I wrote where I interviewed Julie Holtgrave and Maggie, you interviewed her for the podcast. So she works for the American College of Lifestyle Medicine. And she didn't really talk about food waste specifically, but she did talk about how they communicate to their attendees why they are doing a plant based menu. Right. Why they are doing certain things so that there isn't this reaction of like, oh, you cheaped out on the food for us, or, you know, why aren't we having beef? It's like, here's why. This is our mission. She even said they have paper placemats where they show their food is like, what they're getting. And you know, how it all fits in the, in a wellness kind of diet. Maggie, I don't know if you want to add to that because you spoke with that also. Magdalina Atanassova: Yeah, I was also very impressed by the whole communication and all the effort that they're putting into that because there's also the recipes are in the app so people can be informed about what they're eating, how it's contributing to their health. So it's not just, here's some greens. And also something that she said is they don't highlight the fact that the food does not include meat. Their goal is to feed you. And then you turn around and you say, and that was meatless. Which was also a story that was kind of reiterated by me, Denmark. I spoke to one of their representatives and she said that they're also working a lot. They're training the chefs in the destination. We know Denmark is their local food is very heavily dominated by meat. So they're trying to train all the venues and chefs and teach them how to use meat not as the main ingredient, but rather as something that adds taste, how to place it on the buffet. So it's not the first item that people lean towards, but toward the end of the, of the buffet, how to use more appetizing language just to have people lean towards something else that's plant based rather than meat. And they're starting to see results. And the program is quite new. I think it's just a year old. So they're just in the process. I would like to, you know, investigate in maybe a couple of more years to see how this is actually really changing the dynamic at the destination. But it was really interesting. And another person and Barbara, to your point, I was surprised that chefs don't know about their waste because I had a conversation with a chef, thanks to Jen, who introduced me to him from La Quinta Resort. So he has this big orca, which is kind of A stomach that he feeds with different. And he has, I mean, he has so many different tools to recycle food waste. It was impressive. The orca is just for things from fresh vegetables and so forth. So it's food based. But he also has a machine that recycles glass and other materials that you find in the kitchen and paper and so forth. And they're using that for different things afterwards. So it's not. Again, it's kind of this circular mentality. And he said, my goal is to starve my orca. I'm looking at the ways that they're trying the orca, and then I'm asking them, why did you cut this piece of vegetable? Why didn't you use it? And teaching them ways to actually use it in the process. And again, he went another level where he's bringing his chefs to the local farmers where they can get educated on how the food is produced, how they can utilize different aspects of the plants. And was like, it was mind blowing. And he's so passionate about it, which was like, I hope all the chefs are so knowledgeable, first of all, and then so passionate that they're elevating their game really to the next level. Barbara Palmer: Barbara he appears in the story and you can. And you can listen to him on the podcast. I mean, his passion just kind of gets you on the momentum on the other end. There's so many small actions that aren't as exciting. Just like instead of, you know, putting a roll for every person plus a couple extra on the table, actually out of 10 people, they've discovered not everybody eats bread. And so you can actually, on a table for 10, you can put eight rolls out. Those little things really add up. Or putting things in smaller containers, like not having the salad dressing in a terrine. And when you start doing that and seeing that it doesn't affect the quality, that you can start looking at bigger things. One of the things that people talk about is their risk is the risk on the venue side is that they're not going to produce enough food and the client is going to be unhappy. And the risk on the planner side is that people are going to be unhappy with food. And so when you get those two things together, overproduction on the venue side to cover, and then overestimating on planner side to make sure every contingency is covered, then it does become possible to see how those incredible amounts of food can get wasted. I saw a. This was a venue on Bainbridge island near Seattle where they had an event. And it was, it was Youth. It was like young people, college students. And they literally measured, weighed the food waste the first night, and then the next day, they talked to them about it and said, you know, this is how much that got wasted. I think we can do better. And then it became an education process about how not to waste food and a competition and something that everybody, you know, that kind of, if everybody's in it together and there's that peer pressure thing, it would be significant amounts of food that then people would not waste. Michelle Russell: I'm reminded, Barbara, when you were talking about that, of a story we did a while ago, again, about behavior of your participants. And one of the things that this event, it was a smaller event, one of the things they wanted to circumvent was this idea that people are embarrassed to go up for seconds to the buffet line because it makes them look like, you know, they're overeating or whatever. So there's a tendency for people to really pile up on their food, and then they end up not eating it. And so that contributes to food waste. But this one event just had these little signs at tables that said, second helpings are welcome or please go back for seconds or whatever. And that really prevented the food waste because they didn't have this social, you know, cultural feeling that they needed to be sure not to get up again and go back for seconds because people would be looking at them in a way that they didn't. They weren't welcoming. So I think it's just those little tweaks that you were talking about. There are small things that can be done to help prevent food waste. Barbara Palmer: I think what's so great about this report is that there are, and Jen included a lot of them in the story. But there's very practical advice on what planners can do to start kind of, you know, increase what they're doing or start doing. And I think that it's proven that the demand is there. The conversation used to be, well, we can't really justify the cost of doing this if the demand isn't there from the planner. And the planner was like, well, we can't really do this alone, but we have to have the venue participating. So I think this shows how much closer we're getting to having those conversations and cooperating together. Magdalina Atanassova: My takeaway personally from season 10, which is completely dedicated to food and beverage, was how much it really means to attend these right now. If you want to show them care, really, you can show it through food and beverage. And there was a great quote from Tracy Stuckrath from Thrive Meetings and events. And she's also a podcast host. She said if you want to change the way people experience your event, start with the food. It just shows where we are at and how something that used to happen in between sessions now is very, very important moment in how events are being organized. So with that, if you don't have anything else to add, maybe we can just send people to all the links in the show notes where they can read more about the cover story, the reports, and some of the takeaways from season 10. And there's a lot to dive into. So thank you all for the conversation. Jen Dienst: Thank you guys. Magdalina Atanassova: Thank you. Remember to subscribe to the Convene Podcast on your favorite listening platform to stay updated with our latest episodes. For further industry insights from the Convene team, head over to PCMA.org/convene. My name is Maggie. Stay inspired. Keep inspiring. And until next time.