Food Waste in Your Kitchen

We've become far less knowledge about what real produce looks like and what is seasonally available. This often results in supermarkets rejecting tonnes of perfectly edible produce every year. Last week we rescued 130 kg of organic strawberries from ending up in landfill, just because they didn’t meet supermarket-shelving standards, have a look! 

We are avid composters here at Cornersmith and have a serious composting system called the Pulp Master, which liquefies our kitchen scraps, even some of our packaging like the bio-cups to make fertiliser. While every commercial kitchen should have something like a Pulp Master, we know that households are working on a much smaller scale.  Each Cornersmith staff member has their own preferred method of composting, from Bokashi bins to worm farms. But the composting choice we are hearing more and more about is urban back yard chickens! Chickens love food scraps and their waste is a rich garden fertiliser. 

Alongside composting, we try and reduce the amount of food waste we create altogether. We turn excess fruit into an old time beverage known as a shrub; stone fruit pips become syrups and flavoured vinegars; we use whey from cheese making to make muffins, fermented sodas and caramel; plus we never discard the stems of herbs and try to use every part of a vegetable – even the green part of leeks! These are all little things that can make a big difference to the overall reduction of what ends up in your bin. 

Cornersmith is committed to food waste reduction as a long term project, so stay tuned - we will always have lots to share.