A video has been making the rounds on social media that shows mounds of “good food” thrown away in many multiples of bags in the garbage outside of a Starbucks in NYC.
Apparently, the location in question was closing it’s doors, and re-locating to a different town when TikToker, and environmentalist, Anna Sacks (@thetrashwalker), happened upon the bags outside of the store.
She started recording, taking a peek, and was blown away by the amount of wasted food, and cups she found within the black garbage bags.
Everything was new, in the package, and nowhere exceeding a due date. It was so much food, that it seemed to be enough food to feed an army.
Coffee beans, croissants, egg bites, brownies, bagels tea bags, Kind bars, and biscotti’s. Then there were non-perishable good’s like brand-new cups, napkins, coffee stirrer’s, and god knows what else inside of the bags.
“Because this is a pervasive problem, we should have guidelines and standards where the store should make an effort to donate,” she told Insider.
The fact that there was even a church just across the street from the thrown away goods angered everyone all the more as the coffee shop could have donated everything while barely expending energy.
Anna Sack’s TikTok account has over 400,000 thousand followers, and when she shared the wasteful scene with them – they were just as disturbed by her discovery as she was. The video has gone viral with almost 3 million views garnered.
Food waste is a shocking everyday occurrence in the fast food world. Little Caesar’s was called out for the same thing recently – when someone found a mountain of pizza’s in the garbage and shared it with Reddit, it caused just as much of a stir.
Commenter’s that worked in the industry either in the present or the past gave the negative reactions a slew of different reasons for the food being thrown out, the leading reason being…legalities. Some remarked that it was up to the discretion of the managers to either let their employee’s take the food home, donate it, or give it away to customer’s.
Starbuck’s responded to Insider’s inquiry about the food waste and said, “”In this video, Starbucks can confirm that the food pictured was no longer deemed safe to transfer or donate per food donation standards, and per policy, were required to discard.”
A nebulous answer which doesn’t really say much of anything.
Sacks rescued as much of the food for her own personal use as she could, along with others who weren’t shown on video. She ended her TikTok, by eating some of the food she had salvaged saying:
“Starbucks needs to recognize that when they close stores, this wastefulness is not acceptable.”
