At 8:50 p.m. at Au Bon Pain in Huntsman Hall on March 5, the cafe's last customers watched workers empty full baskets of leftover bagels, croissants, muffins and pastries into the trash.
The waste at the cafe two weeks ago was hardly a one-time event. Nursing sophomore Emily Wallhauser said she was "astounded" when she observed the routine for the first time last semester.
"There are people down the street who would do anything for just one of those bagels," Wallhauser said.
But two months ago, the cafe improved its habits through the Au Bon Pain Food Collection program, in which student volunteers collect leftover baked goods to be served at the weekly Hillel soup kitchen, according to College junior Jenny Guttman, who oversees the food collection.
The program sends volunteers from Hillel and the Alpha Phi Omega community-service fraternity to the cafe Monday through Thursday evenings to collect food. The program is at least three years old, Guttman said, but it was suspended last semester due to "a change in management" at the cafe, as well as her own scheduling limitations, she said.
Program volunteers arrive approximately 10 minutes before closing time, when they gather leftover goods and transport them to a refrigerator in the basement of Steinhardt Hall, where they are stored for the following Sunday's soup kitchen.
The food-rescue program is a four-night operation due to the difficulty of recruiting volunteers on weekends, Guttman said, despite the fact that the baked goods would be freshest for the soup kitchen if they were picked up on Friday and Saturday nights.
Guttman did not know why the volunteers were absent on March 5, which was a Wednesday evening. When the volunteers aren't there, it seems that the cafe reverts to old habits of waste, although the manager and employees refused to comment due to corporate policy.
According to Business Services Director Barbara Lea-Kruger, "Penn encourages all its vendors to make every effort to minimize food waste" by preparing more foods to order rather than in advance, as well as donating leftovers to local non-profit groups, she wrote in an e-mail.
She added that Business Services also welcomes recommendations from students on decreasing food waste.
"We are happy to accept additional recommendations from students . and will share these recommendations not just with Au Bon Pain but with our other vendors as well," she wrote.
Despite the encouragement from Penn, Philabundance, the region's largest food-rescue organization with 600 distribution sites in Philadelphia, does not have any current partnerships with vendors at the University, nor does it have records of any past partnerships, Emily Teel, the organization's food donations manager, said.
"From what I can tell, the only donations we've gotten credited to [Penn] were two food drives in 2005," she said. However, records of previous partnerships could have been lost when the organization merged with the Philadelphia Food Bank in 2004, she added.
According to Teel, Philabundance would be happy to work with Penn if the on-campus vendors decided to reach out.
"In the event that they would call us, [Penn] vendors would fall under the criteria of any of our food donors," she said.
