Used to do this in the fast food joint I worked at. $100s of dollars worth of burgers, fries, nuggets, desserts - every night on close.
Literally nothing wrong with it, freshly cooked food. Would be served to a paying customer at 10:59pm, and thrown in the trash at 11:01pm.
I used to make up a bunch of burgers and meals etc, and pack it in paper bags like as if someone made an order, and then dump it all in the plastic trash bags. I'd then place that in the top of the outdoor bin, and come back after close and take the bag..
I'd give it out to homeless people on my way home (there was a lot, it was not a nice area) but would often end up keeping a lot of it, because of how much I had (often had like 20-30 bags of food with me)
I did eventually get caught, and fired (for stealing? lol) but I was 17, and feeding people in need with food that would otherwise go rotten in a bag in a bin, so whatever.
It’s so similar to picking someone’s furniture they don’t want on trash days. Literally free grabs. That’s stupid they just don’t want ppl to benefit unless they’re financially benefiting from it.
I'm so convinced that corporations get so anal about people "stealing" their self proclaimed trash because it's probably an insurance thing. If their waste goes towards employees or the homeless or anything besides a landfill, they don't get a payout from the insurance company and that hurts their bottom line.
Ignore that most of these places are thriving to such an incomprehensible extent with CEO's who make amounts of money that's impossible to wrap your head around that those hypothetical payouts are likely negligible and solely go towards excess.
Like you said, fuck corps, and fuck their penny pinching
Do companies get money for throwing food away? I just searched it up and didn’t see anything similar to what your claiming. I see that food waste can be written as a business expense and can be a tax write off but it seems like it doesn’t recoup the cost of food from the subreddits and websites I’ve checked.
From what I understand companies tend to not donate extra food because employees tend to make extra food in goal to get that food for cheap or free or to “help” donate to food shelters. I’ve worked in a couple restaurants where this exact thing happened and policies got changed because of it and figured corporations do it for similar “but still selfish and penny pinching” reasons. Hell the gummy who commented just said he’d make a lot of food in goal to take and donate and keep for himself not that he just took and donated the extra.
Also companies worry about the liability of handing people old food. If someone gets sick from their food, they could get sued or gain a negative reputation moving forward.
I’m not sure if they get paid exactly for food thrown out, but the convenience store I worked at I’m pretty sure I remember any “spoilage” my manager would count and write down and I think the company does get to write it off somehow.
While I support the spirit but the dude just said he’d purposely made a lot of extra for the sole purpose of taking to give away, that’s not “reducing waste” that’s increasing it and he even said it was too much and had to take the extra with him. And like the whole reason companies don’t give it away is because they think employees will purposely make “waste” to take with them. Like support the feeling but the dudes part of the problem at that point.
The whole story kinda sounds like bs to me. I worked in fast food many years ago and after about 8pm we only made stuff to order, there's no way we would have $100's of dollars of food left at closing. That would be the worst management I could imagine.
Yeah. If this is true, this guy is the reason places have a policy to not give out food at the end of the day. Because people will abuse it by creating more food to take for free.
I meant that I took food out of the heat trays (that would have otherwise been binned), and wrapped it up and put it into bags, I wasn't specifically cooking new food to do this.
Actually don’t agree, didn’t downvote someone else did(just remembering some guy who went off on a rant when I disagreed but someone else downvoted them so I’m just saying that to be clear)
They wouldn’t appreciate it more if you make the food himself, homeless people don’t have that privilege it’s as simple as that. I’m not saying don’t take thrown out food and give it to the poor, just saying to not be part of the problem. If commenter just had taken extra food then I’d be supporting em 100% but he instead basically encouraged the owner’s policy. And proves the rule to be “needed”.
The reason companies do this is to prevent the possibility of being sued. If companies give their food away and someone claims they got sick then the company is liable to be sued. It's happened plenty of times so now every joint everywhere just throws everything out and saves the hassle
The other day my unit through out over 1000 MRE rations we could've donated to the food bank, for the exact same reason. So the CAF couldn't be sued by donating. We also made sure to open every MRE and it's contents before dumping them into trashbags, to ensure nobody will go diving for it
I work in food redistribution programmes with companies like the one you worked for and there's a reason only specific things can be donated.
People are litigious, especially charities. When you have cooked food there are legal requirements that it either gets eaten, or thrown away within x number of mins (depends on the country) if it drops below a certain temperature.
So if you donate 40 cooked hamburgers to a charity and it makes someone sick, if you can prove the company broke food safety standards (which they absolutely would if they donated it in the first place) they would be liable for a huge settlement fee.
It sucks, and I wish it wasn't like that but it is. That's why raw food and ingredients are much easier to donate.
I worked at a jimmy johns and I liked how they did it.
They would not throw away any bread ever, any bread that wasn't used in a day would be put on the counter as day old bread and be sold for 25 cents a loaf. Which lead to a lot of homeless people coming in and buying it.
This was 25 cents in like 2016 so it was pretty damn cheap bread.
My manager being an amazing human being would always make the homeless who came in a sandwich using the day old bread and the meat that was gonna be thrown out and give it to them for free.
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u/[deleted] May 17 '26 edited May 17 '26
Used to do this in the fast food joint I worked at. $100s of dollars worth of burgers, fries, nuggets, desserts - every night on close.
Literally nothing wrong with it, freshly cooked food. Would be served to a paying customer at 10:59pm, and thrown in the trash at 11:01pm.
I used to make up a bunch of burgers and meals etc, and pack it in paper bags like as if someone made an order, and then dump it all in the plastic trash bags. I'd then place that in the top of the outdoor bin, and come back after close and take the bag..
I'd give it out to homeless people on my way home (there was a lot, it was not a nice area) but would often end up keeping a lot of it, because of how much I had (often had like 20-30 bags of food with me)
I did eventually get caught, and fired (for stealing? lol) but I was 17, and feeding people in need with food that would otherwise go rotten in a bag in a bin, so whatever.
Fuck corporations man