Starbucks said Thursday it will accelerate plans to give all its stores’ unsold ready-to-eat meals to food banks.
The chain launched a pilot program six months ago for select Starbucks stores to donate extra food at the end of each day and said it would expand the effort over the next five years across its 7,600 company-operated locations. Now, it says the rollout of the Starbucks FoodShare program will be complete by 2019, two years ahead of schedule.
Since March, the $84 billion company has contributed 300,000 meals to charity. The chain partnered with nonprofits Feeding America and Food Donation Connection to scale FoodShare nationally.
Restaurants are among the biggest sources of food waste in the United States, where up to 40 percent of food goes uneaten. Much of that food ends up in landfills, where it rots and spews about 3.3 billion tons of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere. At the same time, nearly 15.3 million children in the U.S. lack regular access to nutritious meals.
While some chains, such as Pret-A-Manger and Whole Foods, bake donations into their business models, other food companies have been slow to catch on, due in part to concerns about liability if someone gets sick eating their food.
Starbucks credited its staff ― “partners” in its corporate lingo ― for pushing the company to widen the FoodShare program’s reach more quickly.
“Partners take great pride in being the catalyst for this program, they know food that couldn’t be sold in our stores the next day, yet was still safe to consume, could serve a higher purpose,” Alyssa Edelen, a Starbucks district manager in San Diego, California, said in a press release. “They are reminded of their impact every time they work a closing shift and put salads and sandwiches in the refrigerator instead of the trash for people who are hungry.”
Staffers working those closing shifts may need more co-workers just to manage end-of-day donations, however. For months, Starbucks employees across the country have complained that apparent cutbacks in hours have left stores understaffed. Workers say the situation is responsible for long lines at many locations.
Starbucks vowed two years ago to overhaul its scheduling policies in hopes of easing the burden on workers struggling to balance their lives with the chain’s erratic hours and shifts. Labor advocates at the time told The Huffington Post the change was insufficient, noting that workers needed enough hours to guarantee a livable income, too.
The company denied slashing the number of hours its staff work, but a two-month-old petition arguing otherwise had garnered more than 17,000 signatures by Friday morning.
“The labor situation has gone from tight to infuriating,” Jaime Prater, the employee who started the petition, wrote on its Coworker.org page. “Labor has been cut so much in corporate stores, that one call-off (an employee calling in sick) impacts the entire day, as managers are directed to cut shifts to save on labor costs.”
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