Case Study

The Problem

In the US, food waste is responsible for more than half of landfill methane emissions to the atmosphere. Landfilled food waste is also a missed opportunity to keep resources circulating within our food system. As state diversion mandates increase to address the issue, companies across the food value chain are seeking partners who can meet them where they are from both an operational and sustainability standpoint.

Such was the case for US Cold Storage, a nationwide cold storage provider operating facilities across the country, and its key sustainability-focused customers like Oatly. When multi-stakeholder efforts to sell or donate products are exhausted, products warehoused on behalf of US Cold customers must be securely destroyed with tangible and verifiable circularity outputs. With few platforms offering true food system circularity (the recovery of energy, nutrients, water and data), meeting these sustainability expectations can be a challenge.

Managing destruction volumes that vary by location, product type, and season is another common obstacle. Traditional service models weren’t built to handle less-than-truckload disposals economically. US Cold needed partners flexible enough to cost-effectively meet each site where it is, with the documentation, brand security and sustainability outcomes its customers demand.

Our Solution

In California, Divert built a flexible solution aligned to US Cold sites’ product disposal volumes, operational needs, and compliance requirements. By offering a dynamic pricing structure, optimized material routing, and access to its Circularity Platform, Divert helped US Cold scale its sustainable destruction program with operational consistency across California locations.

Divert scaled this model across seven of US Cold’s California facilities to provide secure product destruction, certified documentation, and end-to-end material tracking for unsaleable food products produced by major food brands.

Every load was tracked from receipt through final processing, giving US Cold and its brand customers audit-ready documentation, stronger brand protection, and confidence in compliance reporting.

For Oatly, this program enabled disposals of any scale to be efficiently completed, advancing the company’s commitment to eliminate all waste-to-landfill by 2030. This ambitious goal builds upon their complete diversion of production waste achieved in 2024, expanding the scope to include warehousing operations. So far, 120,000+ lbs. of Oatly product leaving US Cold McClellan Park have been processed at Divert’s Integrated Diversion and Energy facility in Turlock, CA.

The partnership supports the regional food value chain by processing unsold food and beverage products locally into renewable energy and nutrient-rich fertilizers, returning the energy and nutrient value of these items to the local circular economy via Divert’s Circularity Platform.

Divert’s coast-to-coast footprint of Integrated Diversion & Energy Facilities delivers fully integrated solutions for customers that drive regional impacts at national scale. in Turlock, California, Divert delivers renewable natural gas to the pipeline and provides fertilizer and soil amendments to partners like Western Milling and Crème Brulee Farming Co., supporting local farms across the region to grow new food. Divert’s facility also recycles the food-bound water it receives to help run its operations.

The Results

In its first fifteen months of partnership with US Cold, Divert delivered measurable outcomes across cost, compliance, and sustainability:

Material from US Cold and its customers is processed at Divert’s Turlock, CA facility, which at capacity can annually:

• Produce enough renewable energy to power more than 4,000 homes
• Generate 500,000 gallons of liquid fertilizer – enough to support the growth of 112M pounds of strawberries
• Generate 10,000 wet tons of soil amendment – enough to treat up to 2,000 acres of farmland
• Offset 23,000 metric tons of CO2e emissions

By building a service model around flexibility rather than rigidity, Divert gave US Cold a partnership that reduces costs, delivers the brand security, compliance and sustainability documentation for key customers like Oatly, and keeps the value of unsold food circulating locally. The partnership established a repeatable model that can scale across additional distributed warehouse operations.

[i] These metrics reflect Divert’s proprietary estimation of incremental Renewable Natural Gas (RNG) production (in MMBtu) assignable to specific food types without a baseline (e.g., uncontrolled emissions in a landfill or compost site) or balance-of-system considerations (e.g., transportation efficiencies), when processed by anaerobic digestion. CO2e and Miles reflect the avoided emissions equivalent to the energy value of the RNG that is created, calculated per the EPA’s Greenhouse Gase Equivalencies Methods, www.epa.gov/energy/greenhouse-gas-equivalencies-calculator

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