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Finding food waste solutions has become the Finks' life's work, and their nonprofit, ReFED, is helping lead the way.
I walk past plants taller than I am on my way into Betsy and Jesse Fink’s home in Katama — a stunning barn compound on a sprawling piece of land with meadow gardens you could get lost in. At the property’s entrance, there’s a small wooden sign with the word “Refugia” carved into it, indicating not only that I was at the right place, but that environmental causes are at the heart of just about everything that happens here.
Betsy and Jesse Fink are two of the founders of ReFED, a national nonprofit known for its work combating food waste through data-driven solutions. Their work involves researching, advocating for, and implementing strategies to minimize food waste, improve resource efficiency, and enhance the overall sustainability of food systems. ReFED’s data has helped businesses like Google and the states of Oregon and Washington launch their own food waste recovery and recycling initiatives. ReFED also looks to draw in new philanthropic and investment capital, along with technology, business, and innovation, to the food waste challenge.
As a quick refresher for those who need it, food waste is a significant driver of climate change. When food is thrown away — about 40 percent of food grown in the U.S. is tossed out every year — it ends up in landfills where it decomposes and produces methane, a potent greenhouse gas. Composting food waste can reduce methane emissions, but in many places, such as Martha’s Vineyard, people still throw a lot of their food waste into the trash. Food waste is also the cause of other environmental issues such as loss of resources such as water, land, and labor.
Islanders may also recognize the Finks through the Betsy and Jesse Fink Family Foundation, which has supported local nonprofits such as Island Grown Initiative’s gleaning program and food waste initiative, the MV Atlas of Life program, and Martha’s Vineyard Fishermen’s Preservation Trust. Many people previously featured in this magazine such as Mary Sage Napolitan, Matt Pelikan, and Noli Taylor are Fink Fellows; the foundation’s fellowship program that supports people in their work to make our communities more sustainable and resilient against climate change.
Betsy and Jesse have always been interested in environmental causes. Betsy is originally from Ithaca, New York (“farm country,” she calls it) and Jesse is from Lynbrook, New York. They met at State University of New York’s College of Environmental Science and Forestry in Syracuse. (“He stalked me in statistics class,” Betsy says, laughing. “It’s true,” Jesse adds.) They got married in 1982. That summer, they discovered Martha’s Vineyard on their bicycles. Fifteen years later, they came back with their kids. They loved the Island so much, they decided to build a home.
“There’s just something different about the Vineyard,” Betsy says, gazing out at her sun-drenched pollinator garden through the barn’s large windows.
“The cultural diversity and the environmental and ecological diversity is what really drew us here,” Jesse adds from across the long table where we sit.
Jesse was the founding COO of the online travel company Priceline, and Betsy was project manager on the founding team, too. They left the company in 1999, and began their work as philanthropists in the agriculture and sustainability space. They’ve spent the last 20 years investing in climate initiatives and helping put food waste as a climate solution on the national agenda. They do this on a local level, too.
Just the night before, the Finks had about 25 people over for dinner in the room where we sit now. They invited folks from Earthjustice, a nonprofit they support, to Martha’s Vineyard. They also invited people on the Island they know who are interested in the environment. The group gathered around a long stretch of tables that ran down the room. They enjoyed a dinner from Betsy’s garden.
“It was a way to get everyone exposed to Earthjustice, but also for people to share ideas,” Jesse tells me.
This concept of convening like-minded people is at the core of the Finks’ work. They often refer to these gatherings as “big tent” events.
Betsy started Millstone Farm in Wilton, Connecticut, in 2005, where they grew food for restaurants and for the local community, and introduced organic crop varieties to the market before there was much demand for it. This was where they got a first-hand look at the issue of food waste: “When I would do deliveries for the farm, I also saw how much food and fresh produce was being discarded in the back of our local markets,” Betsy says.
They’d also occasionally host weddings under big tents.
“Everyone likes to go to a farm wedding, so we would have big tents we’d put up for weddings,” Jesse says. “We were funding and still continue to fund a broad range of nonprofits mostly focused on the environment, and within that, a focus on agriculture. And since we had a tent, we decided, why don’t we bring all of our groups together? For probably three to four years, we’d send out an invitation to all the nonprofits we were supporting and say, ‘Please come to Millstone Farm. We’re going to have a day where you’re all going to talk to each other about the work that you’re doing.’”
Folks from IGI, the Harvard Food Law and Policy Clinic, Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC), and Harlem Grown were among the groups that would attend the big tent gatherings. One year, they focused on what everyone was doing related to food waste.
“In that big tent, hearing different ideas and different stakeholders, we realized that most people are really focused and expert in their sector and in their silo, and it’s bringing those different sectors and silos together where you realize there’s some real opportunity for change,” Jesse says. “We said, you know what, everyone’s doing great work, but there isn’t something that pulls it all together.”
From there, the seeds for ReFED were sown. Jesse involved the investment group he manages, Mission Point Partners, to help conduct an analysis that helped lay the groundwork for a “systemic investing approach” that would use philanthropy and investment to combat food waste. Jesse and his team launched A Roadmap to Reduce Food Waste By 20 Percent, a report that compiled data about food waste and included buy-in from big food and government groups like Walmart and Sodexo and the EPA and USDA. The report included actionable insights, data, charts, statistics, and graphics to show how food waste is a solvable problem with economic benefits. The report, which they published in 2016, customized recommendations to producers, manufacturers, retailers, restaurants, policymakers, and capital providers. Some of the recommendations included closer collaborations between farmers and food businesses to create a second market for imperfect produce, and further adoption of tools to track and analyze food waste at restaurants. Sarah Vared, ReFED’s third co-founder, spearheaded the report.
“Once we launched the report we realized, ‘Wow, people are really paying attention to this,’” Jesse tells me. “We realized we needed to keep going. And that’s when it went from a report to an organization, and from an organization to a standalone nonprofit, and it just keeps growing. And the culture of ReFED, I think it embodies the way we look at solving problems.”
ReFED made a leap in 2021 when it launched its Insights Engine platform, an interactive database that users can use to monitor their own food waste, look for solutions, find providers, calculate impact, track capital, and find policies. It features the most comprehensive look at food waste in the United States. For example, if a food business wants to learn what they can do to reduce food waste, they can use the Insight Engine platform to filter through 42 analyzed solutions to find those that work best for them. They can use different filters to prioritize for financial savings, greenhouse gas emissions, or any other priorities, and the platform will provide an estimate of how much the solution costs per ton of food saved. People can also click on solutions that interest them to find businesses and nonprofits in their area that provide those services.
“We’re trying to make as much analysis as possible at people’s fingertips, so they can be champions for the topic, and they can know within whatever their sphere is of all the things they could be doing,” ReFED’s executive director Dana Gunders told me in a phone conversation we had the week before. “What’s going to have the most impact, you know? And what can I afford right now? How much is it going to cost so that I can actually know I can do it?”
ReFED also has a new Roadmap to 2030, which outlines goals for reducing food waste in the U.S. by 50 percent by 2030. The roadmap looks at the entire food supply chain and identifies seven key action areas showing where the food system must focus its efforts to reduce waste, including strengthening food rescue, reshaping consumer environments, recycling anything remaining, and optimizing the harvest, among other strategies.
What has to happen is it can’t be voluntary anymore. There has to be legislation, regulations that say you really have to [separate food waste] if you’re a large restaurant, if you’re in food service, or even the hospital or the high school — you need to separate food waste because now you can bring it to one of these particular places.
– Jesse Fink, co-founder of ReFED
ReFED also has a re-granting program, where funders or philanthropists who are interested in food waste but don’t know how to get involved can give a donation to ReFED, and ReFED will then re-grant it to various large or small nonprofit organizations that could use it. A grant from this program went to Growing Places Garden Project in Leominster to develop a Fresh Chef Kit program to provide locally sourced and lightly processed produce to SNAP households in north-central Massachusetts.
Through ReFED, the Finks have helped create more national and local awareness around food waste. They believe the issue is solvable, but it has to be done on a local level. IGI has made some great strides for food waste recovery and recycling over the years (with the Finks’ support) through its food waste drop-off site at Thimble Farm (though that’s closing September 1 — see our story on page 9), and through its gleaning program. The local nonprofit has helped redirect more than 3 million pounds of household and restaurant scraps out of the Island’s waste stream. But efforts have to go beyond the farm.
“What has to happen is it can’t be voluntary anymore,” Jesse said. “There has to be legislation, regulations that say you really have to do it if you’re a large restaurant, if you’re in food service, or even the hospital or the high school — you need to separate food waste because now you can bring it to one of these particular places.”
In Massachusetts, we’re lucky we have progressive policy around food waste compared to other states. According to state law, any facility that produces more than one-half ton of food waste per week must divert it from landfills. In Boston, there’s a free curbside food waste collection for residents, and small businesses like Bootstrap Compost (bit.ly/BuildingBootstrap) helped create the infrastructure and made composting accessible to residents before the city did. That’s along the lines of what the Finks hope to see on Martha’s Vineyard.
“IGI did an amazing job pushing it forward with the idea that there was going to be a handoff to some commercial operation, but it’s not happening,” Jesse says. “When the time comes when we have a place to do it and no, you have to do it, it’ll be done.”
Another thing about food waste: “So far it hasn’t been politicized,” Jesse says. “And if we can continue that way, it’s huge, where you can have both our political parties realizing that food waste solutions are important. They view it in a different way. There may be one side that looks at the redirection of food to feed people, there could be another side that says it can save money for businesses. Regardless, it really works for everybody.”
And without making things too political, I ask Betsy and Jesse if they have any dream stakeholders for food waste they haven’t been able to reach yet.
“Michelle Obama,” Jesse says. “When she was in the White House, she was focused on agriculture and gardens —”
“And food health for children,” Betsy adds.
“I just think she’d be a wonderful person to understand food waste. She’s got an amazing platform to be a messenger for that,” Jesse says.
This concept of “the right messenger” is important to the Finks. Through their foundation, they support individuals “who are amazing storytellers with powerful messages to share,” like Terry Tempest Williams and Robin Kimmerer who wrote Braiding Sweetgrass, Jesse says (book is available on Amazon).
One in seven Americans are food insecure, so the issue of food waste exists in this paradoxical context where there are people hungry for the food that’s being thrown away. It brings me back to a concept I remember Rebecca Haag mentioning to me almost a decade ago when I first started learning about food insecurity on the Island. Answers lie in providing “the right food, at the right time, in the right form, to the right people,” she told me. And as the Finks say, food waste is a systemic issue, and its solutions are systemic, too.
“Food waste is a systemwide problem that occurs across all sectors of the supply chain,” ReFED’s team told me via email. “But it’s also a solvable problem. We know what works — we just need the right combination of motivation, stakeholder alignment, and funding to make it happen.”
As ReFED looks toward the future, it plans to keep innovating, fundraising, and potentially expanding internationally. Jesse and Betsy will continue to split their time between the Island and their home in Boulder, Colorado, where their kids live. They spend their free time kayaking and hiking. Betsy loves to get lost in her gardens and make bouquets for friends. In biology, refugia is a location that supports isolated or relict populations of species that were once more widespread. That’s how the Finks see their home in Katama, too: “A place where species come during climate change to survive and hopefully proliferate,” Betsy says.
“I don’t think we ever dreamed this is the life we would have, but we feel blessed that we have made good choices and have had good luck to be where we are,” Jesse says. “We’ve spent the last 20 years just giving back, helping mentor individuals who are passionate about what they’re doing, and get great satisfaction and gratification seeing people expand their career in making a difference themselves.”
As our conversation wraps up, I ask a question I always do: Is there anything we haven’t talked about that we should?
“Our love for each other,” Jesse says.
“We’re stronger together, we figured out,” Betsy adds, laughing.
A memorable answer to what can sometimes be a throwaway question. The Finks truly leave nothing to waste.
