Most companies throw away surplus food because donating it costs more time, money, and coordination than tossing it in a dumpster. While liability fears get the most attention, the real barriers are more mundane: logistics, refrigeration, staffing, and the simple fact that disposal is the path of least resistance. The reasons stack on top of each other, and understanding them explains why an estimated 30 to 40 percent of the U.S. food supply still ends up wasted.
Logistics Are the Biggest Practical Barrier
Throwing food away is operationally simple. A restaurant or grocery store tosses surplus into a bin, a hauler picks it up, and it goes to a landfill. Donation, by contrast, requires someone to sort the food, package it properly, coordinate a pickup time with a food bank, and often keep perishable items at safe temperatures until they’re collected. For a busy store manager closing up at 10 p.m., that’s a significant ask.
Perishable food is especially difficult. The entire journey from donor to recipient has to maintain what the industry calls a “cold chain,” a continuous series of refrigerated environments from the store’s back room to the food bank’s warehouse to the final distribution point. Food banks rely on costly refrigeration units and climate-controlled warehouse space, and many smaller organizations simply don’t have enough of it. If a food bank can’t pick up a pallet of yogurt within a few hours, that yogurt can’t be safely donated at all.
Transportation adds another layer. Someone has to drive a refrigerated truck to the donor’s location, load the food, and deliver it. Many food banks operate on thin budgets and can’t afford to run pickups across a wide geographic area on short notice. Even food policy experts have called for a specific tax deduction or credit to cover transportation costs, which signals how significant this gap is.
Disposal Is Surprisingly Cheap
For most businesses, the cost of throwing food away is low enough that it doesn’t force a change in behavior. Landfill tipping fees vary by region, but in a high-cost area like Los Angeles County, food waste disposal runs about $100 to $136 per ton. That sounds like a lot until you consider that a single grocery store might generate only a few tons of waste per month, making the disposal bill a rounding error in an operation with millions in revenue.
Donation, meanwhile, carries real costs that don’t show up on a landfill invoice: staff time for sorting and labeling, storage space, coordination with nonprofits, and potential need for additional food safety training. For a company weighing these against a modest waste hauling fee, the math often favors the dumpster.
The Liability Fear That Won’t Go Away
In a national survey by America’s Second Harvest (now Feeding America), more than 80 percent of companies said the threat of liability for food-related injuries was their greatest deterrent to donating. This fear persists despite being largely unfounded.
The Bill Emerson Good Samaritan Food Donation Act, a federal law, provides broad protection. Any person or business that donates “apparently wholesome food” in good faith to a nonprofit for distribution to people in need is shielded from both civil and criminal liability. The protection covers food that meets safety and labeling standards but isn’t readily sellable due to appearance, age, freshness, size, or surplus. The only exception is gross negligence or intentional misconduct, meaning a company would have to knowingly donate food it believed was harmful.
The law also covers direct donations from grocery stores, restaurants, caterers, and agricultural producers to individuals in need, not just donations routed through nonprofits. And here’s the telling detail: there are no cases on record in which a defendant has even raised the Good Samaritan Act as a defense, because lawsuits over donated food essentially don’t happen. The legal risk is near zero, but the perception of risk remains powerful inside corporate legal departments that default to caution.
Food Safety Rules Add Real Complexity
Even with liability protections, companies still need to follow food safety guidelines when donating. The FDA requires that donated food be wholesome, properly labeled (including allergen information), and maintained at safe temperatures. Hot foods must stay at 135°F or above, cold foods at 41°F or below. Packaging needs to be intact. Produce shouldn’t show signs of spoilage like changes in texture or color.
None of these requirements are unreasonable, but they do require systems. A store needs clear protocols for employees to follow: what can be donated, how to label it, where to store it, and how to document it. Many businesses, especially smaller ones, haven’t built those systems. Without a straightforward process, individual employees making in-the-moment decisions will default to the trash can because it’s the safe, easy choice.
State and local regulations add another wrinkle. Food donation rules vary by jurisdiction, so a national chain operating in dozens of states faces a patchwork of requirements that complicate any effort to create a standardized donation program.
Tax Benefits Exist but Aren’t Always Compelling
Federal tax law does reward food donation. Since the PATH Act of 2015, all business types (not just large corporations) can claim an enhanced tax deduction for qualifying food donations. The deduction allows a business to write off roughly twice its cost basis for donated food. For example, a grocery store donating potatoes that cost $30 to acquire but have a $100 retail value could deduct $60 instead of just the $30 cost basis.
When these incentives were temporarily expanded in 2005, food donations across the country jumped 137 percent the following year, which shows that financial incentives work when they’re attractive enough. But the current deduction has caps: most businesses can deduct no more than 15 percent of their taxable income for food donations, and the paperwork to qualify for the enhanced rate requires tracking the fair market value and cost basis of donated items. For a restaurant donating a few trays of unsold food each week, the tax savings may not justify the accounting effort.
Even food that doesn’t meet the enhanced deduction criteria can be written off at its cost basis, which is better than nothing. But “better than nothing” isn’t the same as “better than throwing it away,” especially when disposal is cheap and the deduction is modest.
Brand Protection and Internal Risk Aversion
Companies also worry about their brand showing up in the wrong context. A food manufacturer doesn’t want its branded products distributed in ways it can’t control, potentially ending up resold, photographed in poor condition, or associated with a food safety incident. Some companies destroy surplus inventory specifically to protect brand value, the same logic that drives fashion brands to shred unsold clothing.
Internal corporate culture reinforces this. Risk management teams tend to focus on what could go wrong rather than what could go right. When a legal department flags even a small theoretical risk from donation, the default recommendation is disposal. This is especially true at large companies where the person making the disposal decision has no incentive to take on extra work or risk, however small, for a benefit that accrues to the company’s reputation rather than their own performance metrics.
Technology Is Closing Some Gaps
A growing number of platforms are trying to connect surplus food with people who can use it. Apps like Too Good To Go let restaurants and stores sell surplus food to consumers at a discount rather than throwing it away. Food rescue organizations use logistics software to coordinate pickups from donors and route them to distribution sites, essentially solving the coordination problem that makes donation so cumbersome.
These tools help, but they haven’t transformed the landscape yet. Too Good To Go, for instance, operates primarily in cities where there’s a dense enough customer base to make pickups worthwhile, and some users have found the service works better for sellers than buyers. A pilot study with university students found no measurable reduction in overall food waste from using such apps, partly because the “mystery bag” format meant consumers sometimes couldn’t use everything they received.
The more promising developments are on the logistics side, where food banks are adopting supply chain management techniques borrowed from the grocery industry. By optimizing warehouse operations and delivery routes, some food banks have been able to accept more perishable donations without increasing costs. But scaling these improvements requires funding that many food banks don’t have, creating a cycle where the organizations best positioned to accept donations are the ones that least need the help.