When Food Becomes Surplus: The Business Decisions That Decide Its Fate

In early 2025, when a salmon farm in New York prepared to shut down, it faced a decision most businesses never plan for: what happens to food that still exists when the business no longer can.

LocalCoho, a land-based salmon farming company in Auburn, New York, was closing after failing to secure further investment. Inside its tanks were more than 18,000 kilograms of coho salmon — edible, high-quality food with real economic and nutritional value.

Instead of allowing that food to be destroyed or discarded, the company worked with the Food Bank of Central New York to donate the fish for distribution to people who needed it. The decision was reported by several outlets, including Voice of America, because it revealed something rarely discussed: food waste is often the result of business choices made at the edges of systems, not at their centre.

Food waste isn’t accidental — it’s structural

Globally, around one-third of all food produced is never eaten. The United Nations estimates that food loss and waste account for 8–10% of global greenhouse gas emissions, alongside the loss of land, water, energy, labour, and capital used to produce it.

Food waste is frequently framed as a consumer problem. In reality, much of it is shaped upstream — by how businesses plan for surplus, manage risk, and handle what happens when markets fail or operations end.

When food becomes surplus, systems often treat it as a liability rather than a resource.

Where value usually disappears

In most business closures, surplus food quietly vanishes:

• written off

• destroyed

• rendered unusable by time, regulation, or logistics

Not because people don’t care — but because recovery isn’t built into standard operating models.

What made this case unusual was not generosity, but preparedness under pressure.

The fish were still alive. The timeline was tight. Volunteers, cold storage, transport, and processing all had to align quickly. This wasn’t symbolic action. It was operational decision-making at speed.

Waste and hunger sit inside the same system

Food banks increasingly operate at the intersection of two realities:

• surplus created by market inefficiencies

• scarcity experienced by households

In the United States alone, millions of people face food insecurity each year, while vast quantities of edible food are discarded because systems aren’t designed to redirect it.

The LocalCoho decision didn’t solve that imbalance.But it interrupted one small part of it.

That’s where food-waste value actually exists — not in grand solutions, but in moments where businesses choose what to do with surplus instead of defaulting to loss.

Why this is a business story — not a charity story

It would be easy to frame this as goodwill. That misses the point.

This is about:

• recognising food as an asset even when a business fails

• understanding that closure doesn’t erase responsibility

• treating waste prevention as value preservation

Under the UN’s Sustainable Development Goal 12 (Responsible Consumption and Production), reducing food waste is explicitly identified as a business responsibility — not just a consumer one.

This decision aligns with that thinking, even if it wasn’t framed in those terms at the time.

What this reveals about good business

Good business isn’t defined only by growth or success. It’s revealed most clearly at moments of strain.

When a business closes, the default outcome is loss.But loss doesn’t have to mean waste.

Stories like this show that even in failure, businesses still make choices — and those choices determine whether resources are destroyed, or redirected to where they are needed.

A final observation

Food waste rarely comes from bad intent. It comes from systems designed without end-of-life thinking.

This story matters because it shows that surplus is not inevitable waste — it’s a decision point.

Stories of Business exists to surface these moments, where everyday business choices quietly shape environmental and human outcomes long before consumers ever see them.

A practical toolkit on food waste and business decision-making will follow in our subsequent posts.