We are thrilled to offer a variety of webinars this year featuring leaders in food waste prevention, recovery, and composting across multiple sectors.
Webinar start times are shown in Eastern Daylight Time. Each webinar is 50 minutes in length. This schedule may be revised.
To register, click on the webinar title in the schedule. Check out the descriptions below the schedule to learn more about each webinar.
If you would like to watch a webinar from last year, please go to webinar recordings.
| Start Time (EDT) | Mon Sep 28 | Tue Sep 29 | Wed Sep 30 | Thu Oct 1 | Fri Oct 2 | Sat Oct 3 |
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10am |
Changing Habits, Saving Food: Global Lessons in Behavior Change (registration link pending) |
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11am |
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12pm |
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1pm |
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2pm |
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3pm |
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4pm |
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5pm |
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6pm |
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Held during Food Waste Prevention Week, this webinar aims to build momentum ahead of the International Day of Awareness of Food Loss and Waste, the annual observance jointly led by FAO and UNEP. Bringing together global experts, the discussion will explore how behavior change can help move food waste prevention beyond awareness into lasting action. Through examples ranging from national campaigns and behavioral science to industry commitments and community initiatives, speakers will share practical lessons on what works, what doesn’t, and what can be adapted across different contexts. The webinar will also highlight the vital role of children and young people in shaping lifelong food habits. Participants will leave with practical ideas and transferable strategies to strengthen food waste prevention efforts and help build momentum towards the International Day.
What happens to prepared meals when cafeterias and food service businesses have more than they need? Pete’s Garden and Share My Meals share how they’ve built successful partnerships with hospitals, universities, schools, and local businesses to recover surplus food and redirect it to community members in need of food assistance. From Kansas City to New Jersey, learn how these models work, what meaningful community engagement looks like in practice, and how your organization can get involved — as a food provider, community partner, or advocate for change.
Following minimizing food wasted, making food scraps collection accessible to achieve high capture with minimal contamination—and ensuring reliable, local composting capacity—are foundational. This moderated discussion explores practical strategies for creating convenient, accessible food scraps collection programs, including in multi-family settings. We will also highlight the role of community composting in fostering deeper community engagement, minimizing contamination, keeping valuable nutrients local to support food-growing initiatives, and building more resilient communities through stronger connections to food waste reduction and composting.
How can we change daily habits and design food choices to reduce waste? Zero Waste Europe and Mission:FoodPossible share insights on leveraging behavioral science and cultural education to shift consumer mindsets. From nudging Europe’s consumers to reclaiming underutilized local crops in Jamaica, learn how these globally adaptable strategies uncover untapped potentials in waste prevention. Discover how to move food waste prevention beyond awareness into lasting action through smart daily practices, improved food systems, and community-centered education.
Join Mill and the City of Scottsdale for Food Waste Prevention Week to explore how food recyclers are supporting municipal waste strategy. Scottsdale will share a real-world case study: how 16 fire stations are diverting waste at the source through a grant-funded pilot program. You’ll hear how prevention-first behavior change, friendly inter-station competition, and audit data are shaping early results, plus practical lessons on planning, procurement, and long-term program sustainability for your own city.
How do we maximize food recovery while maintaining food safety? This session explores best practices for safe food rescue, highlighting successful initiatives like school share tables and donation to nonprofits. Panelists will discuss how clear guidance can address public health and liability concerns, featuring NRDC’s guide for engaging health departments. Through case studies across multiple states, you’ll learn about food safety, how to collaborate with your local health department, and how to standardize operations to optimize the amount of food rescued.
This session inspires critical behavior change by connecting Utah’s community food rescue milestones with approachable daily kitchen habits for home cooks. Participants will discover live cooking strategies designed to shift consumer mindsets, stretch grocery budgets, and build the confidence needed to eliminate household food waste.
Roughly 7 billion meals are served each year to more than 45 million children enrolled in U.S. K–12 public schools, resulting in substantial food waste. Reducing that waste can provide environmental benefits, increase meal consumption, save costs, and combat food insecurity. Join the Environmental Law Institute and expert panelists at this Food Waste Prevention Week webinar to learn about best practices for reducing food waste in schools. We will also explore capacity-building resources developed by ELI and the Natural Resources Defense Council for states, public school districts, and schools, including the Model State Law on Reducing Food Waste in K–12 Public Schools.
School lunchrooms are a significant source of food waste, but they also represent one of our greatest opportunities for environmental and financial impact. Join the Educated Choices Program and the Florida Green School PTSA to discover how you can inspire your students to improve sustainability in their school and community. This webinar bridges the gap between early food waste education and actionable solutions students can support now and build on throughout their lives.
The speakers will share their perspectives on different models for food recovery, and how they can be adapted across food system economic and policy contexts. Eliza Blank and Luis Yepiz (Farmlink CEO and Managing Director of Food Program & Agency Relations) will cover challenges with creating a nimble food recovery process on a national scale for large-scale perishable farm produce donations. Jen English (National Food Recovery Association Co-chair) will share her broad perspective on food recovery operations, technology and policy, highlighting strategies for tailoring food recovery processes to different economic and policy contexts, and different types of donated food.
Goals of this webinar are to:
Join Tony Cook from Second Harvest Inland Northwest and Stephanie De La Hoz from Move For Hunger for a conversation on large-scale food recovery. They’ll share how their organizations recover truckloads of surplus food and transport it to hunger relief agencies, turning what could be waste into meals for neighbors in need. Learn what it takes to move food at scale, the logistics behind the process, and how tools like Zilch help partners reduce waste ratios while getting more fresh, nutritious food to the people who need it most.
This webinar explores why food waste prevention often falls short even in the most well-intentioned companies. It features a panel of experts discussing common obstacles, such as misaligned organizational goals, conflicting incentives, and data blind spots. The panel highlights leadership behaviors that influence change and presents practical approaches for achieving lasting waste reduction. The event is aimed at food industry professionals, operations managers, and organizational leaders looking for actionable strategies to improve their food waste prevention efforts.
Via this webinar, we hope to inspire other changemakers wherever they might be in their journey. Perhaps they are just starting out and need a little courage and inspiration. Perhaps they are already on a changemaker path but could use some new ideas. Perhaps they are active as a changemaker and simply want to share some notes with passionate others.
Food Recovery at events is gaining traction, but there is more to zero food waste than donating the leftover edible food. Today’s event professionals are strategically minimizing food waste with shifts in pre and post event planning, menu selection, vendor and attendee engagement, community partnerships and tracking metrics. Panelists will share successful strategies from recent events which impacted food waste and also impacts your carbon footprint AND bottom line.
Join Sophia Lin Kanno of The Spicy Grasshopper and Robert Lee of Rescuing Leftover Cuisine for a candid conversation about food rescue myths and realities. They’ll unpack the Good Samaritan Act and what it actually protects, demystify expiration dates and “best by” labels, and clear up confusion about which foods are safe to donate. The conversation also tackles the cultural stigma around food donation and the staggering scale of food waste happening behind the scenes. Whether you’re a business owner, volunteer, or just curious, you’ll leave with practical answers and a fresh perspective.
Gradible will host a panel featuring companies from its sustainability marketplace that are actively reducing food waste across hotels, stadiums, and large facilities. Attendees will leave with vetted solutions, available funding sources, and a clear understanding of the ROI behind food waste prevention.
Food Shift and StopWaste will discuss how outreach and legislation about wasted food can have unintended outcomes, causing inequity even with the best of intentions. They will share lessons learned and how prioritizing food access and justice can strengthen edible food recovery efforts, improve community outreach, and drive more effective, impactful outcomes to maximize food use.
Then, we will cover new legislation proposed by Madison Climate Changemakers and some of the ways they have learned from others and tweaked their own proposals to avoid those pitfalls. This session is a round-table discussion where audience participation is invited and encouraged.
Learn from Metafoodx, GeoGardenClub, and Share My Meals how technology can help prevent food waste in both the garden and the commercial kitchen, creating a more efficient food ecosystem that increases food security in communities.
