Micro-grant Winner: Fancy Nancy
Renzi Wise | August 28, 2020
New York City businesses generate more than 650,000 tons of food scraps each year. The Sanitation Foundation is on a mission to change that. Last fall, we offered two $2,000 micro-grants to small companies looking to launch a food waste reduction program or expand their current activities around food waste.
We were proud to award one of those grants to Fancy Nancy, an intimate neighborhood restaurant in Bedford-Stuyvesant. Committed to sustainability and serving their community, Fancy Nancy hosts a weekly Sunday Supper, where chefs use remaining food from the week to create a fun pre-fixe menu, and also feed all their employees before closing on Monday. While these traditions helped to reduce waste (and build community!), post-consumer waste remained a challenge. With the help of the 2019 Micro-grant, Fancy Nancy set out to explore options to implement a composting process and to build an on-site storage area for organics bins.
Since receiving the grant in November of 2019, Fancy Nancy has diverted an astounding 3,600 pounds (and counting) of food waste from landfills. Annie Sloan, Director of Sustainability at Fancy Nancy, says of their success: “Without the Microgrant Program we would not have felt we could experiment with organic separation solutions. Thanks to the Foundation's support we were able to refine our organics program to our small restaurant's needs, and also experiment with what could work for other small NYC restaurants. They not only provided financial support but also provided friendly advice, handy resources, and instructive suggestions.”
Even more incredibly, Fancy Nancy didn’t stop at reducing their own environmental footprint! In an effort to amplify their impact, they have also used the grant money to create a sustainability guide to help other small food service establishments on their journey to divert organic waste from landfills.
Sharing best practices with other small food service establishments was a natural next step for Sloan, who believes that “keeping food waste out of landfills is one of the best (and easiest) things people can do for our warming climate. It makes so much more sense to turn amazing food scraps into soil for New Yorkers instead of methane emissions.” Leading by example and offering a helping hand to others at every turn, Fancy Nancy is a true testament to the powerful role the restaurant industry can and must play in the fight against climate change.