Turlock welcomes plant that turns grocery waste into fuel. Food banks get their share, too

Inside Look is a Modesto Bee series where we take readers behind the scenes at restaurants, new businesses, local landmarks and news stories.

Divert Inc. has started up a Turlock plant that turns unsold groceries into fuel and fertilizer.

The West Main Street business also gleans still-edible items and donates them to food banks. It began operating Nov. 21, with 40 employees, and held a ribbon-cutting Wednesday, Dec. 4.

Speakers said the plant will combat climate change along with poverty. Organic waste can emit methane, a potent polluter, if it decomposes in landfills. The plant also will help a little toward Pacific Gas & Electric Co.’s goal for low-carbon sources.

The guests included Zoe Heller, director of CalRecycle, a state agency that seeks to reduce waste.

“Working together, you’re doing so many things — boosting the region’s ability to turn food scraps into renewable fuel, helping businesses cut waste and get it to people who need it the most, and energizing the local economy with new infrastructure and jobs,” Heller said.

Divert invested about $100 million in the site and broke ground in April 2023. The company was founded in 2007 in Concord, Mass., and has 11 similar plants around the country. It aims to have 30 by 2031.

Divert has had a smaller site on Soderquist Road in Turlock since 2020. The 20-member staff advised food companies on reducing waste. It is now folded into the new operation, on 18 acres just east of Washington Road.

The plant is supplied by grocery chains and other food companies from Bakersfield to Sacramento and in the Bay Area. They pay Divert for the service, which helps them meet California’s climate goals.

Divert expects to handle about 100,00 tons of waste each year. The grocery chains include Save Mart, Lucky, Safeway, Albertson’s, Target and CVS. Among the nonretail clients are the Turlock processing plants for Blue Diamond Growers almonds and California Dairies milk and butter.

Just how does unsold food become fuel?

Divert will run daily, around the clock. It paused the processing for tours that followed the ribbon-cutting.

The feedstock includes produce, bread, eggs and dairy items, but not raw meat. The food is dropped off by trucks and placed into bins about three feet deep. In one of them, visitors saw an intact watermelon amid wilted flowers, bags of salad greens, two-ounce packets of guacamole, and more.

The first step is removing plastic and other nonpaper containers, using what Divert called in a news release a “proprietary depackaging solution.” The containers will go to a landfill for now. Heller noted that her agency is working on this part of the waste stream, too, including single-use plastics.

Divert mashes the remaining organic waste into a slurry. Ammonia sulfate is removed at this point and sold as a fertilizer ingredient. The slurry goes into a 3.5 million-gallon “digester,” where it is broken down by bacteria, another secret recipe. The resulting gas is purified to PG&E standards and injected into its new pipeline at the site.

The gas is enough to supply about 3,000 homes. PG&E now gets less than 1% of its gas from low-carbon sources but aims for 15% by 2030, said Austin Hastings, vice president for gas engineering. The early phase has included manure digesters at dairy farms, such as the Aemetis Inc. cluster near Keyes.

These sources still emit carbon, but much less than the petroleum long tapped by PG&E and other gas utilities.

Divert builds on waste reduction efforts already in place at grocery chains. Modesto-based Save Mart, for example, began composting surplus produce in 1997, selling the soil amendment to its own customers. This year, it created an app where people can get discounts on expiring foods.

‘We’re providing that better way’

The Divert event featured Kevin Lovell, senior vice president of operations for Safeway in Northern California. He recalled starting as a clerk in 1985, when the main concern over waste was separating glass bottles by color.

The U.S. Department of Agriculture estimates that about 62 million tons of food goes uneaten each year, nearly a third of the supply. Farmers can face pests or low prices. Processors and grocery managers might cull produce that is blemished but still edible. Home cooks might overpurchase or lack storage.

Divert has signed on about 8,000 of the 50,000-plus grocery stores nationwide, CEO and co-founder Ryan Begin said.

“(They) have decided that they’re no longer going to throw food into the landfill,” he said. “There is a better way, and we’re providing that better way.”

Divert fits with the Stanislaus 2030 bioindustry plan, which calls for 40,000 jobs in and near the county by decade’s end. Its key piece would be a test site for turning crop and livestock waste into energy and materials.

When did Blue Diamond come aboard?

Blue Diamond announced its involvement with Divert in September. The almond collective already has uses for shells and hulls. Divert takes the leftovers from turning the nut kernels into milk, flour and other products.

Blue Diamond also got a $45 million federal grant in 2022 to better capture carbon in its Central Valley orchards.

Divert will give some of its edible goods to Second Harvest of the Greater Valley. The Manteca-based food bank serves the Northern San Joaquin Valley and five mountain counties. Attendees at the ribbon-cutting could donate holiday meals to the Alameda County Community Food Bank.

The event also drew Jason Brown of North Carolina, who left the NFL for farming and advocacy against food waste. He had become the league’s highest-paid center during his 2007-12 career with the Ravens and Rams. He now runs First Fruits Farm, which actually grows vegetables on about 1,000 acres near Louisburg. They are donated to nearby people in need as part of a Christian ministry.

“We’re in America,” Brown told the Turlock crowd. “How can there be food insecurity all around us when we’re surrounded by farms, we’re surrounded by farmers?”