Denali, a full-service recycler of organics, and HelloFresh, a national meal kit provider, have achieved a significant environmental milestone of repurposing nearly 4 million pounds of food waste in Phoenix. The collaboration transforms food waste into valuable products such as compost and animal feed, fostering a circular economy by reintegrating these outputs into agriculture. Together the companies help combat climate change by diverting food waste from landfills – a major contributor of greenhouse gasses.
This unique food waste diversion program began in 2023, focusing on recycling pre-consumer food waste from HelloFresh’s facilities in Goodyear and Phoenix, Arizona. With logistics provided by Innovative Waste Recycling (IWR), a national waste management company specializing in sustainable solutions, Denali’s depackaging machines cleanly separate the food waste from trash. Leveraging its network of facilities in the Phoenix area, Denali then transforms the food waste into compost that nourishes farms and gardens in the region, and animal feed that offers local farmers a more sustainable feed option.
By the end of the year, Denali, HelloFresh, and Innovative Waste Recycling will have diverted 4 million pounds of food waste from Phoenix landfills. This equates to preventing an estimated 1,307 tons of CO2 greenhouse gasses from entering the atmosphere, which is comparable to the emissions from driving more than 1.5 million miles in an average gasoline-powered vehicle.
Denali’s advanced machinery does the previously labor-intensive work to mechanically separate cardboard, plastic, and other packaging from food. These are ingredients that cannot be placed in HelloFresh meal kits due to quality issues - typically food scraps resulting from produce, dairy products, and bread, as well as other ingredients that are too close to their expiration dates.
Denali then mixes the resulting clean stream of organics with green waste such as lawn clippings and tree limbs, to create more than 20,000 tons of nutrient-rich compost in Phoenix each year, which is enough to fill one million one-cubic-foot retail bags of soil.
Denali’s operational scale enables the company to recycle organic waste from HelloFresh’s production centers in the Phoenix area. Consumers and shoppers can purchase compost created from food scraps recycled by Denali and HelloFresh in stores around the area.
