Social Entrepreneurship Company Turns Scraps Into Cash

The founder of EcoScraps, a social entrepreneurship company that collects roughly 20 tons of food waste a day and turns it into potting soil, came up with the idea while still in college at Brigham Young University.

While he was eating at a popular buffet on campus, he couldn’t help but notice the staggering amount of food that ended up in the restaurant’s garbage cans. As a business major, he began to realize that if your cost of raw materials was nothing, you could make fantastic profit margins.

Thus EcoScraps was founded in 2010, and the company now collects food waste from more than 70 grocers, produce wholesalers and Costco stores across Utah and Arizona. It then composts this waste into potting soil, which retails for up to $8.50 a bag in nurseries and garden stores throughout the western US.

The company now has eight full-time employees and 14 part-time employees, and sales are expected to hit more than $1.5 million in 2011.

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