It’s taken about five years for Sam Ingardia, co-owner of Santa Ana-based Ingardia Bros. Produce Inc. with brother Joseph, to convert the food supply company to a zero-landfill and solar-powered operation.
There’s a reason for such patience.
“Everything that we provide is grown from the land, and I really am concerned about landfills,” Sam Ingardia said.
Ingardia Bros. generates $95 million in annual revenue from its 65,000-square-foot headquarters and distribution center. The company daily sends its fleet of white trucks with the familiar red-and-green logo to service more than 1,800 restaurants, schools, hospitals and senior living homes throughout Southern California. The enterprise creates six to seven tons of solid waste each month, which causes a variety of concerns for Ingardia.
Many of the food items—vegetables, fruit, fish and canned goods—are delivered on hundreds of wooden pallets loaded with thousands of large cardboard boxes, plastic bags and Styrofoam coolers.
The company also must deal with the hundreds of pounds of trimmed produce, fish heads, bones and blemished products that fall short of Ingardia’s standards. The blemished items are safe, but most chefs would be unhappy to serve the items to their customers.
“It doesn’t happen often, but out of 10,000 pounds of fish we might have 300 pounds that are unusable at restaurants,” Ingardia said.
Those problems are compounded because all of the food items must be cooled or refrigerated continuously to preserve freshness, and the company’s electricity bill can be $32,000 a month during the summer.
Ingardia has used multiple tactics, some at a slightly higher cost, to become a zero-landfill and solar-powered company.
The company switched to Anaheim-based Certified Waste Solutions in December for its solid waste recycling program.
“It costs about $100 more a month [to $850], but I’m assured that 100% of the wastes do not go into a landfill,” Ingardia said.
Certified Waste Chief Executive Justin Dalton said the firm sorts the materials, and then works with two local waste-to-energy facilities to burn items and provide electricity to 20,000 homes in the area. The ashes and residue are then used to pave roads that lead to various facilities. The ash is not smooth enough for commercial use on freeways and local streets, Dalton said. Certified Waste is also “in the process” of turning Ingardia’s fruit and vegetable trimmings into feed for animals at local farms.
Ingardia Bros.’ other food wastes—fish heads or blemished filets—are sold to local pet-food makers for pennies per pound. “No pet will become sick from eating those items,” Ingardia said.
In 2015, Ingardia Bros. sent 520,000 pounds of fresh fish scraps for recycling. The company usually receives a credit for the blemished items from the fish seller for future purchases.
Ingardia Bros. is able to save its customers’ money by reusing some of the unsoiled, sturdy cardboard boxes that it receives for bulk amounts of fruits and vegetables.
Reusing a cardboard box saves about $1 per box, or about 60% of packaging costs, according to Ingardia, who said the savings is passed to the customers.
In 2015, Ingardia Bros. sent 550,000 pounds of damaged or soiled boxes to a recycling company, Ingardia said. Separate recyclers picked up 8,500 wooden pallets and hundreds of pounds of plastic bags.
Ingardia’s solution to high electricity costs was to install more than 1,300 solar panels on the company roof at the end of December. He regards the $805,000 purchase—which needed about 90 days for government approval and for installation—as an investment that will pay for itself in about seven years. The company can immediately take an energy tax credit of about $300,000 and hopes to see a 30% reduction in its energy bills.
Ingardia Bros.’ 200-person staff works around the clock every day to evaluate, process, repackage and deliver food items, meaning the company must purchase electricity throughout the entire day, including during expensive peak hours.
The company’s electricity bill for January, the first month the solar panels were used, was about $12,000, compared with $17,000 a year earlier.
“And that’s with all the rain that occurred early in January,” Ingardia said.
The solar panels generate the most electricity on clear and sunny days.
Ingardia hopes to purchase commercial batteries to store the solar power in the future.
“The panels only generate power during the daytime, and I cannot (currently) capture a portion of that electricity for use at night,” he said.
He’s begun searching for providers of commercial batteries but wants to wait at least a year before purchasing the semitruck-sized product.
He would have waited another year before publicly announcing the solar panels but decided it was an important change that his customers would appreciate. Every purchase is an investment meant to lower annual expenses, Ingardia said.
“This is all about providing high-quality products to independent restaurants and businesses in Orange County.”
