A local nonprofit organization that transports extra food from Valley businesses to homeless shelters and food banks is looking to put suggestions made by ASU students into action.
Three W. P. Carey master’s of business administration students drafted a study last semester as part of a final class project.
Dee Mitten, executive director of Waste Not Arizona, said the company greatly appreciated the study and gained valuable information from it.
The group will discuss and make changes to its current operating system in the coming weeks during its annual strategic planning session.
Waste Not Arizona operates six days a week using four refrigerated trucks to transport food. The company’s service operates all over the Valley.
Though Waste Not doesn’t currently pick up leftover food from ASU, it used to do pickups from Sun Devil Stadium, Mitten said.
Elliot Rabinovich, an associate professor at the W. P. Carey School of Business, taught the supply chain management logistics course.
“We gave students the opportunity to take a look at this organization and see how they could do things a little bit better,” he said.
The three students chose to work on this project, a fact Rabinovich said is important because it’s outside of the normal curriculum.
Waste Not Arizona operates on a very tight schedule because it must take unused food from businesses to shelters and banks in a short period of time.
“They work with a very, very limited amount of resources,” Rabinovich said. “They were just interested in getting a fresh set of eyes.”
Ross Cain, a second-year MBA student, chose to study Waste Not Arizona for his final project and was one of the three students who helped complete the report.
“I really liked that it was a nonprofit organization because a lot of times they can’t use the kind of technology that for-profit businesses can, because they don’t have the money to invest in that kind of stuff,” he said.
Cain said he and his classmates tried to make feasible proposals and suggest ideas that the company could implement.
“The biggest suggestion we made was to better organize the daily route,” Cain said. “[Waste Not] is primarily dependent on people who, for example, have an extra palette of tomatoes at the last minute, but Waste Not can’t make last-minute changes to the pickup schedule.”
Because the company operates using only four trucks starting in the early-morning hours, it must adhere to a strict schedule in order to get all donations to a food shelter on time.
“Basically, we said they should free up one of the trucks so it could be available for changes in schedule and extra pick ups,” Cain said.
Mitten said though she doesn’t feel like Waste Not has been hampered by a lack of technology, it could benefit from new equipment.
“They had a lot of ideas we could utilize and perhaps we can grow into some of the larger scenarios they painted for us,” she said.
Timothy Tyrrell, director of the Megapolitan Tourism Research Center within ASU’s College of Public Programs, established the connection between Waste Not Arizona and ASU last fall and sought out business students to study the business.
“We came to [Waste Not Arizona] to see if there was anything we could do to help,” Tyrrell said. “We though it is a great illustration of some of the good that tourism does.”
Tyrrell said his center often reaches out to students across ASU’s four campuses to complete studies and projects.
“We could never get everything done by ourselves,” he said. “We collaborate with as many folks as we can.”
Reach the reporter at tessa.muggeridge@asu.edu.
