“Wasted Food in Maine: An Overview” with Susanne Lee

Susanne Lee, faculty fellow at UMaine’s Mitchell Center for Sustainability Solutions will tell us about Food Rescue Maine and lead a conversation about statewide efforts to reduce wasted food by engaging with businesses, institutions, and households. This takes place on Tuesday, September 30, 3:00 p.m. at Camden Public Library.

This program is put on by Nativity Lutheran Church‘s Creation Care Team and part of their program series “Wasted Food: Challenges and Community Solutions.” This event is co-sponsored by Camden Public Library.

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Susanne Lee’s career as an entrepreneurial business executive saw her successfully creating, launching and operating multi-million-dollar consumer products brands and businesses with Fortune 100 companies as well as lean start-ups. Her skills include strategic solutions, P&L management, brand marketing, consumer insights, business development, product design and manufacturing, licensing, merchandising, operations, and strong team-building.

Coming to academia as the Executive-in-Residence at the Maine Business School (MBS), Susanne utilized her business management and marketing experience to bring the “real-world” into MBS courses and projects. Key accomplishments include innovative initiatives like the Maine Business School Speaker Series: “Thriving Under Thirty”, the UMaine/MBS experiential learning, “Corporate Classroom” held at Hannaford corporate offices, and “live” case studies with Bangor Savings, JC Penney, and more.

Susanne’s most popular MBS coursework focused on sustainable business and marketing highlighting companies such as Patagonia whose superior “triple bottom line” strategy benefits their “profits, people and the planet”.  In 2019, Susanne was awarded a Mitchell Center grant to fund a multidisciplinary student research project identifying sustainable, “triple bottom line” zero-waste food system solutions for Maine.

Susanne joined the Mitchell Center as a Faculty Fellow in Fall 2021 as part of the Mitchell Center’s Materials Management team.  Within that transdisciplinary group, Susanne leads a student/faculty team working directly with state, business, and community stakeholders as well as national and global food waste experts like ReFED and Harvard Food Law & Policy to develop solutions to end food waste in Maine.  Each year, the students implement a number of stakeholder-driven pilots to help Maine communities and organizations to build a sustainable, waste-free, circular food system. Statewide progress is shared through the Maine Food Waste Solutions Summit held annually in April.