The elementary school district of Elkhart, Indiana is using leftover school cafeteria food to make frozen meals for students in need. Students at Elkhart Community Schools typically eat breakfast and lunch at their school cafeterias every weekday. But some students do not have enough to eat while at home during the weekend. This month, the district launched a pilot program with Cultivate Culinary, a nonprofit that recovers unserved food from catering businesses and turns it into frozen meals. Unused school cafeteria food will now be turned into frozen meals, and 20 students will get a backpack containing eight frozen meals to take home for the weekend. The school district says it hopes to expand the scheme to other schools.

It’s estimated that more than 13 million children in the USA live in families that regularly don’t have enough to eat. Props to Elkhart for addressing a small part of this problem. Here are two thoughts to take away...

Face the waste. We all know waste is bad for the planet. And a moral outrage in a world where many still don’t have enough (food, clothes, shelter, and more). So look to your own processes and ask: where are the wasted resources here? Think broadly – raw materials, physical spaces, machinery and equipment, human labor and more. Is there an opportunity to bring that wasted resource to the people around you who need it most? Could the office that you leave unused every night become a valuable community space? Could local children make use of your spare laptops? You get the idea. It’s the right thing to do. And you’ll win plenty of kudos along the way.

Ace a new business model. Cultivate Culinary have built a nonprofit around an ingenious idea: hoover up the waste created by the restaurant and catering industries, and repurpose it as frozen meals for the hungry. More broadly, we’re seeing some deeply interesting new business models centred around the idea of waste reduction – check out Loop, a zero-waste subscription service for food and household goods backed by Unilever, P&G, Nestlé and others. What is the primary waste issue in your industry? Wasted packaging, fuel, time, something else? Is there an opportunity for a new business model to create an offering that’s more convenient, cheaper, and less wasteful than the mainstream alternative?