UF Helps Animals Get Leftover Treats From Theme Parks and Restaurants

November 25, 1997

GAINESVILLE — You’ve eaten your Thanksgiving dinner, cleaned up the kitchen and scraped the leftovers into Fido’s dish. That’s easy for one family, but what do you do if you’re, say, Walt Disney World and you have 35 tons of leftovers to get rid of — every day of the year?

Pretty much the same thing.

For the past year, the University of Florida’s Institute of Food and Agricultural Sciences has been helping Disney, Universal Studios, the International House of Pancakes and Domino’s Pizza turn their food waste into dehydrated, pelletized, high-quality animal food.

The product, now being produced by NutraFeed in Clermont, is suitable for pigs, horses and cattle, and soon it will be available for dogs, cats and other household pets.

Not only is the concept environmentally sound because it keeps waste out of Florida’s burgeoning landfills, it also happens to be safe and healthy for its four-legged consumers, said Joel Brendemuhl, a UF animal science professor.

“The product has already been USDA approved for human consumption. It’s been cooked at the restaurant and is re-cooked through the rendering process,” Brendemuhl said.

Visitors to Walt Disney World alone generate up to 35 tons of food waste a day, said Ted McKim, water and waste resources manager for Reedy Creek Energy Services, an on-site subsidiary that manages Disney’s solid waste removal. Since 1988, when Florida passed the Solid Waste Management Act, Disney has sought ways to recycle 30 percent of its waste.

“Even with cans, plastic, cardboard and glass, we soon found we were falling short of our 30 percent goal,” he said. “We started looking at what else we could recycle and found that food was a significant portion of our waste.”

Reedy Creek arranged for Kenny Camp, then a local pig farmer, to collect and sterilize their food waste and feed it to his swine operation. But Camp’s 1,200-swine herd couldn’t keep up with the volume.

In 1993, Disney also began to compost food waste for use on its flower beds. “But our compost facility has a finite capacity,” said McKim. “Besides, composting food waste is not the highest end use. A higher use is for animal feed.”

That idea – turning food waste into animal food through dehydration and pelletization – was born out of conversations between UF and Camp, who was seeking an alternative to the wet, heavy garbage he was hauling daily to feed his hogs.

Now director of sales and marketing for NutraFeed, Camp did the original research that launched the project. He contacted UF to conduct independent feed trials to see if the end product was indeed nutritious food for animals. He sent the first pelletized samples to Robert Myer, UF animal science professor, for analysis.

Myer tested the feed on swine. “When it comes to food, pigs are a good test animal,” Myer said. “Young, growing pigs are sensitive to their diets. If there is a problem with their food, they’ll tell you. They’re growing so fast, you’ll know right away if they’re not gaining weight.”

UF’s feed trials spanned the entire life cycle, from young pigs right up to market size.

“We found the product a nutritious feed for pigs,” Myer said. “It is an excellent replacement for a major portion of the corn and some of the soybean meal in a typical pig diet. In fact, it’s more valuable than corn for two reasons: It’s higher protein and it’s higher fat – both important considerations.”

That fat does not translate into unhealthy food for pigs or humans, he says.

“Fast-growing pigs need the high energy from fat. Moreover, the dehydrated food waste is blended in the pig’s diet to control not only the fat but the high salt. After all, this stuff represents an American diet from the resort industry in Central Florida,” he said.

NutraFeed recycles 10 to 13 tons of food waste a day – about one-third of Disney’s total daily food waste. The food waste comes out of the restaurants 98 percent clean, Camp says. (Because of its high Styrofoam content, fast-food waste is still not recycled.)

Incoming material passes through a sorting table where large bones, pineapple tops, paper and plastic are removed. What remains gets liquefied to the consistency of cake batter and then is blended with wheat middlings, a by-product of making flour. From there, it goes to an extruder, which looks something like a cross between a meat grinder and a pasta machine. It then goes to an oven/dryer where 20,000 cubic feet of air heated to over 500 F actually float the pellets to dry them.

This also cooks them, raising the internal temperature of the product to 230 F. When the feed comes out, it’s sterilized and essentially is ready to eat.

“By taking the moisture out, you gain six months storage,” Camp said. “The process also allows us to add minerals and reformulate it to a specific animal’s needs.”

“NutraFeed is one of only three such companies in the world that we are aware of” making the pelletized leftovers, Myer said. The other two are in New Jersey and Canada. Time will tell if any of them make it in the marketplace, he says. It all comes down to economics.

“But overall, it’s the right thing to do,” Brendemuhl said. “Food waste is being kept out of the landfill and put back on the consumer’s table, so to speak.”