There’s a particular aroma to Blue Sparrow Cafés, a small chain of glossy coffeehouses around Denver.
“It’s the chai,” said Jim Adame, manager of Blue Sparrow on Sherman Street, near the state Capitol. “It’s 100% the chai that you smell. We’re making it fresh every day and that just fills all of the cafes.”
Chai lattés have become the café’s signature drink, a house blend of spices that are ground fresh daily and whisked with black tea and sugar. But not too much sugar — “we’re more spice and complexity forward,” Adame said.
Last fall, Blue Sparrow was one of the first businesses to participate in the rebooted Food Matters Restaurant Challenge, a 12-week program that helps Denver restaurants rethink their food waste footprint by coming up with an innovation to implement. After introducing their idea, the restaurants are partnered with an environmental consultant called CET, the Drexel Food Lab for recipe testing, and Diversion Designers for waste consulting.
After 12 weeks of experimenting, testing and implementing, the restaurants are scored and awarded based on their innovations.
Naturally, Blue Sparrow chose to focus on chai.
The revamped recipe allows the café to steep the spices twice, once as a full batch and then again as a half-batch concentrate, increasing the amount of chai they can make from one serving of spices. It adds about 20 minutes to the process, but over the course of the year saved each of the three cafés about $2,500, 14 pounds of spices and 5 pounds of tea leaves.
Beginning Friday, eight of the 11 restaurants that have participated in the challenge will be part of a Denver Food Matters Food Crawl, offering special menu items to show off their innovations. Each menu item earns customers a “stamp” on a digital food crawl card, and enters them to win a multicourse meal at Somebody People.
Taste test in Denver
The Restaurant Challenge is the work of Lesly Baesens, the food waste program administrator at the Denver Department of Public Health and Environment. Baesens was hired by the city in 2019 to focus on preventing food waste as part of a program funded by the National Resources Defense Council. Denver and Baltimore were the first cities selected to try out a variety of incentive-based solutions.
That year, Denver piloted the restaurant challenge format, which focused on food waste in the Highlands neighborhood. Eight restaurants participated, and the whole project helped inform the NRDC’s restaurant challenge guide, released in January 2020. Then COVID-19 closed restaurants nationwide and any energy left for innovating was redirected to staying afloat.
In 2022, Denver voters passed the “Waste No More” ballot measure, creating a citywide ordinance to reduce landfill waste through various diversion incentives and composting requirements.
There are different requirements depending on whether you’re a business owner, event producer, or building landlord or tenant, but the gist is that everyone has to move toward three-stream waste collection — divided among landfill, recycling and compost — and proper education for how to divvy things up, including through new signage. No funding was attached to the ordinance, so even though it passed, implementation has taken years to put together. In the fall, the ordinance was updated with fresh regulations and enforcement measures, with a deadline this year of Sept. 1 for residents and business owners to comply. The name was also changed to the Universal Recycling and Composting Ordinance, or the URCO, as Baesens calls it.
With renewed interest in the URCO and an approaching enforcement deadline, Baesens thought it seemed like the perfect time to reboot the defunct restaurant challenge.
She applied for a grant from the U.S. Department of Agriculture, which funded two cohorts, the fall group that Blue Sparrow was a part of, and a spring cohort that is wrapping up training this week.
Eleven restaurants have participated across the two recent rounds, revamping recipes to use whole eggs instead of tossing the whites (Restaurant Olivia), or saving hundreds of dollars by not coring cucumbers (Pit Fiend Barbecue). Pit Fiend projected they’ll save $1,648 in cucumber costs, while Restaurant Olivia diverted over 1,600 pounds of wasted egg whites.
Getting a foot in the door
Originally, challenge designers hoped that restaurants would take up food donation as one of the strategies to tackle food waste in the city, and brought on We Don’t Waste, a Denver nonprofit that redirects perfectly good food restaurants would have tossed. But so far the restaurants have chosen to focus on restructuring their recipes to reduce the amount of food that could potentially go to the nonprofit.
Just “getting a foot in the door” with restaurants is a huge step, though, Baesens said. “The businesses are so stretched thin. It’s very difficult to make them realize the amount of savings that participating in something like this could mean,” she said. “Because it does take time, it’s a time investment for them to interface with us and to think about what they want to change.”
She’s hoping that having more recent results in hand — $2,500 annually for Blue Sparrow Café, for instance — will encourage other restaurants to take DDPHE up on the next challenge. Assuming, that is, that they find another funding source. (Baesens seemed unsure about landing another USDA grant.) They also directly incentivize restaurants to participate with things like a free month of composting services, reduced membership rates for EatDenver, a nonprofit that promotes the local restaurant scene, and free advertising on food waste diversion platforms like Goodie Bag and Too Good to Go.
Meanwhile, the conversation around diverting food waste has grown slowly, incrementally, over the past seven years. The cohort that Baesens joined in 2019 to start the restaurant challenge has grown to about a dozen cities, with challenges in Memphis, Phoenix, Philadelphia and St. Louis, among others. Seven states have active food waste prevention laws, with implementation in three of those states — Washington, New York and New Jersey — beginning this past January.
At the federal level, the Zero Food Waste Act has been introduced to Congress. The act would create $650 million worth of grants, administered by the Environmental Protection Agency, to state, local, tribal and territorial governments to study and reduce food waste. The same bill was introduced in the 2021-22 session, and the 2023-24 session. It has never made it past introduction.
“What makes us unique in Denver is that we’re focusing on the prevention piece,” Baesens said. “When you’re just composting, you’ve already expended all of the resources that go into growing, harvesting, transporting. So all of these embedded greenhouse gases, the labor, all of that has already been wasted, right? Preventing the waste of the food is where you get the biggest bang for your buck. Environmentally, it’s really big.”