From Lemons To Lemonade: How Venues & Nonprofits Are Turning Food Waste Into A Food Win (Sustainability Matters)

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11:14 am, Thursday, 08/28/2025

FOOD RESCUE: Musically Fed volunteer Devon Gardner (second from left) is pictured helping rescue unused backstage catering at the Coldplay concerts held at Gillette Stadium in Boston July 15-16. With support from tour promoter Live Nation, nutritious food from Eat To The Beat Catering was packaged and delivered by Gardner to Brookline Food Pantry to serve the local community. Photo courtesy of Musically Fed

Food consumption can have a big impact on one’s carbon footprint, from whether you limit your intake of animal products to how you dispose of food waste. Many live entertainment venues that are striving to make their operations more sustainable have taken steps in recent years to reduce food waste, including donating unused catering, composting or minimizing waste to begin with.

A 2023 report from the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) found that food waste comprises about 24% of municipal solid waste disposed of in landfills, but “due to its quick decay rate, food waste in landfills is contributing to more methane emissions than any other landfilled materials,” making up an estimated 58% of the fugitive methane emissions (i.e., those released to the atmosphere). Another statistic of note: “wasting food in the U.S. causes greenhouse gas emissions equivalent to those of more than 50 million gas-powered passenger vehicles.”

With the slogan “Reducing the Planet’s Poverty Footprint While Reducing Society’s Carbon Footprint,” nonprofit Rock and Wrap It Up! has been collecting unused catering from live events to donate to those in need for more than three decades. The organization expanded from working with tours and venues like NYC’s Madison Square Garden for the past 30 years, to partnering with sports teams including the New York Yankees, Jets and Giants, as well as schools and hospitals.

“We have fed over 1 billion people since 1991. We offer environmental stats through an algorithm I developed named The Whole Earth Calculator. It converts pounds of food donated into GHG diversion, number of meals generated and gallons of water saved. It is available on our website,” said CEO and founder Syd Mandelbaum, who adds that Rock and Wrap it Up! just became the food recovery arm for the FIFA World Cup matches taking place next year at MetLife Stadium.

Launched by industry veteran Maria Brunner in 2016 in honor of her late husband, who was a Vietnam veteran, Musically Fed is another nonprofit working with artists, promoters and venues nationwide to donate unused backstage meals to those in need.

Musically Fed partners with tours and festivals in the U.S. and Europe, as well as Allegiant Stadium in Las Vegas; State Farm Stadium in Glendale, Arizona; Ohio Stadium in Columbus and a number of theatres in Nashville – including venues that have composting on site. Brunner says, “I think the emotional part of the message is if we can feed people that normally wouldn’t have this, that comes first and then the composting second. And it works really well.”

That also falls in line with the EPA’s recommendations. The EPA created a “Wasted Food Scale” for reducing the environmental impacts of wasted food, with options ranked based on those that offer the most benefits to the environment and to a circular economy including 1) Prevent Wasted Food 2) Donate or Upcycle 3) Feed Animals or Leave Unharvested and 4) Compost or Anaerobic Digestion (with beneficial use of digestate biosolids).

Musically Fed has more than 70 active volunteers across the country and is always looking for more as the organization nears close to 800,000 meals collected for those in need. Recent tours that have partnered with Musically Fed include Dierks Bentley, Coldplay, Wilco, Brand New, Mumford and Sons, and Billie Eilish, as well as Breakaway Music Festival.

Brunner says that one thing that’s not widely understood is there’s a lot of paperwork involved with collecting unused catering for donations – and that the nonprofit has overhead and needs monetary donations. She notes that some of the tours, including Bentley and Wilco, “offer up donations, which keeps the lights on, which is great, but it’s usually the minority.”

Prudential Center in Newark, New Jersey, is one of the venues that hosted Eilish’s “Hit Me Hard and Soft: The Tour” and followed her Environmental Rider by offering new plant-based meals and using compostable straws, cups, utensils and plates, as well as hosting a food drive for the Community Food Bank of New Jersey.

The 17,500-capacity venue that serves as home to the NHL’s New Jersey Devils recently started composting kitchen waste, and excess food is distributed to the Community Food Bank of New Jersey through the venue’s Food Forward Jersey program sponsored by Campbell’s.

Since launching in the 2018-2019 season, over 30,000 pounds of food from Devils games and select events have been distributed to local food pantries, a venue representative notes. Concessionaire Levy safely collects and prepares cooked, unserved sealed food for pickup, and Prudential Center’s Community Investment team coordinates with the Community Food Bank of New Jersey.

Brunner notes that venues have to evaluate if choices make sense monetarily, and “sustainability can actually make you money if you do it right. … If you are donating it, write it off.”