Interviewed by Chapin Dorsett, Communications & Operations Manager for The HEAL Project
Chapin - Where did the idea for Zero Foodprint come from?
Anthony - We began with an interest in climate solutions and were trying to figure out how to make restaurants part of the solution. We started out by looking at the operations of a restaurant and analyzing its carbon footprint with an eye for how we could reduce that footprint. In 2019 we began collaborations with regional governments and underwent a transformational evolution away from carbon footprinting and carbon neutrality and towards a circular economy approach to carbon farming.
What would you say is the main purpose that Zero Foodprint serves?
Zero Foodprint is giving customers and citizens a way to directly fund carbon farming and regenerative agriculture, so a way to directly take carbon out of the atmosphere in your own region with local farms and ranches. The restaurants that work with us send a portion of their proceeds to our carbon farming projects. Oftentimes they generate that portion by adding an extra one percent fee to customer bills.
Explanatory graphic from zerofoodprint.org with permission.
What kind of restaurants do you partner with?
We really partner with any restaurant or food company, or even just any citizen who wants to fund carbon farming. We’re really excited that the movement is spreading—in Boulder, Colorado, for example, we just had a Subway franchisee sign up with five locations, which is really helping to normalize this carbon farming economy. It’s not just about a few fancy restaurants making better choices; it’s really about the whole food economy coming together to fund a structural change in how ingredients are produced.
How can normal people get involved with the project?
Any person that wants to directly fund carbon farming can contribute to the featured project on our website. The money goes directly into practices like compost application, planting cover crops, reducing tillage, and other practices that build healthy soil on farms and ranches and take carbon out of the atmosphere. People can also dine at participating restaurants and send a portion of their bill to our carbon farming projects. And corporations can start using their CSR dollars towards local climate solutions.
Twisted Fields, of San Gregorio, California, is one of Zero Foodprint’s featured projects. Photo from zerofoodprint.org with permission.
What about farms and ranches—how do they get involved?
In San Mateo, for example, we’re working with the Resource Conservation District, which is reaching out to farmers and ranchers to encourage them to apply for our grants. Farmers and ranchers fill out the COMET-Planner, which is a carbon sequestration modeling tool, and propose a scope of work to us. Let’s say they were interested in applying compost on ten acres of their land. They would plug that project into the COMET-Planner and it would estimate how much carbon the project would draw out of the atmosphere. We divide the proposed cost of the project by the estimated carbon benefit to derive a cost per ton of carbon removal. You can think of it like a carbon sequestration return on investment. So if the project would cost $10,000 and is estimated to draw 100 tons of carbon out of the atmosphere, the cost per ton would be $100. We rank all of the applications primarily based on that number, and then the best projects get the funding. The grantees then work with a technical service provider, like the Resource Conservation District, to implement the project. The RCDs are really the boots on the ground working with the farmers and ranchers on their projects.
Where do you see Zero Foodprint going moving forward?
Our goal is to scale up our work in California and in other states and regions to potentially get to maybe hundreds of businesses participating and millions of dollars per year flowing towards carbon farming in each region. There’s a lot of work to do.
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Anthony Myint is the co-founder of Mission Chinese Food, The Perennial and Zero Foodprint, named 2020 Humanitarian of the Year by The James Beard Foundation. ZFP leads a public private collaboration with governments in California and Colorado to scale regenerative agriculture. Restaurants and businesses that participate in Zero Foodprint are directly funding climate beneficial farming projects that transform bad atmospheric carbon into healthy soil carbon.