Pete Pearson
Senior Director, Food Loss and Waste

Connect: Twitter
Pete Pearson works on food waste prevention and food recovery, helping businesses understand the intersection of agriculture and wildlife conservation. For almost a decade, he has been working as a change agent within various businesses and non-profits on regenerative agriculture, sustainability, and corporate social responsibility (CSR).
Pete has led local and national sustainability programs within the retail grocery sector across 2,000 grocery stores in 37 states. He also has over 10 years of technology experience with companies including Hewlett-Packard, Accenture and Albertsons. He has worked with public schools and hospitals as an independent sustainability consultant, co-founded a non-profit focused on sustainable agriculture, and has also co-produced a documentary film on local food production. Pete currently lives in Washington DC and enjoys fly fishing, boating, and exploring the outdoors with his family.
“Finding harmony between agriculture and nature may be the most important social, economic, and ecological issue of this century. ”
In The News
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The Washington Post
Pandemic-Related Cooking and Eating Habits Could Help Curb Food Waste — If Consumers Stick to Them
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ATTN:
Six Ways to Reduce Food Waste at Home
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CNET
Europe Saves 100,000 Meals per Day With One App. Here's How It Could Work in the US
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Los Angeles Times
Can Climate-Friendly Cuisine Help Save the Planet? Welcome to Zero Foodprint Week
Videos

Green Sports Alliance Webinar: Tackling Food Waste, Even During a Pandemic
WWF partnered with the Green Sports Alliance to discuss the nuances and intricacies of food waste across the sports, hospitality, and entertainment industries. Watch WWF's Pete Pearson and Samantha Kenny talk about best practices to minimize organic waste at large-scale events, giving specific examples of how organizations are addressing this issue during the current Covid-19 pandemic.
More on Pete
Connect: Twitter
Title
Senior Director
Education
- MBA Sustainable Business Management—Green Mountain College
- BS Information Systems—University of Idaho
Areas of Expertise
- Waste and Recycling
- Sustainable/Regenerative Agriculture
- CSR
- Sustainability Programming
Publications
- No Food Left Behind, Part 1: Underutilized Produce Ripe for Alternative Markets application/pdf, 4.28 MB
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Hotel Kitchen: Fighting Food Waste in Hotels
application/binary, 10.5 MB
WWF is working to transform sectors where we see potential to make the biggest impact. It’s estimated that 40% of food waste happens in customer-facing businesses like restaurants, supermarkets and hotels. Hotels, which serve $35 billion dollars in catering and banquets each year in the US, are an ideal test bed to learn, iterate, drive waste reduction, and help reshape the food service industry as leaders in food waste reduction.
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Educating Tomorrow's Food Waste Warriors
application/pdf, 4.63 MB
World Wildlife Fund developed the Food Waste Warrior Curriculum in 2017, launched as part of the Wild Classroom platform. The team piloted the lessons in multiple DC schools, helping each to run food waste audits and reduction efforts. In the process, we garnered several key insights on the challenges, complexities, and areas of opportunity for fighting food loss and waste in schools. -
No Food Left Behind, Part 2: A Tale of Two Markets: A Model for Working Together to Fully Utilize the Surplus
application/pdf, 3.58 MB
The second report in the No Food Left Behind series looks at crops grown for the processing market—frozen, canned, and pickled—and the drivers for waste in this market.