The Gualco Group, Inc. is a co-founder of the pro bono California Food Waste Roundtable, with Craig McNamara, president of the state Board of Food & Agriculture, and Sue Sigler, executive director of the California Association of Food Banks.  Latest development: Roundtable member Doug Rauch, retired president of Trader Joe’s, intends to open a grocery store, Daily Table, in Massachusetts that will sell past-date packaged foods and misshapen fruits and vegetables. The store will target low-income customers in Roxbury (a neighborhood in Boston) and will recover foods currently headed towards the dumpsters — as well as create and sell value-added goods from those products.

The store is Rauch’s reaction to the insane amounts of available food that Americans fail to consume each year: 133 billion pounds. Here’s the thing: This isn’t a radical new idea.

Stores that sell past-date items are not a new phenomenon. It is thought these salvage groceries, as they are known, began in the ever-thrifty Amish community — or at least, that’s who popularized them. To that end, southern Pennsylvania and Ohio have multiple Amish-run stores and even some chains. In fact, there are at least 500 salvage groceries nationwide, likely many more. Conventional grocery stores have strict rules as to what they will accept — and a single damaged good on the pallet can mean rejection. Next step? Salvage grocery.

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