“At Companion Baking, we have focused on reducing food waste at our factory for the past 40 months,” Allen said in his award recognition. “When we first moved into our new facility in late 2015, we didn’t anticipate the challenges we’d encounter with growing the business. Those challenges manifested themselves as mistakes in our production, which essentially means lots and lots of waste. At our low point, we were generating nearly 1,600,000 lbs. of annual trash. That amount of trash will cover an entire football field nearly 5 ft. deep in waste.”

Today, waste reduction plays a role in every decision at Companion, including sales, production, automation and packaging with tools such as flour reclamation on the bread lines and a composting and recycling program that has cut the bakery’s landfill contribution by more than 75%.