Marne company works to keep food out of landfill, prices down

Natural Choice Foods in Marne. (April 1, 2024)

WRIGHT TOWNSHIP, Mich. (WOOD) — A West Michigan company is working toward sustainability by buying up overproduced or undersold food.

Natural Choice Foods was started in 1997 by a father and son who wanted to help keep food out of the landfill. The company has since grown into a 135,000-square-foot Marne facility, which it moved into in 2021, with five of its own stores, Daily Deals Food Outlet. It also sells products in more than 1,000 secondary-market outlet stores throughout the country.

The company’s model is to buy food that has been overproduced or undersold in other major retail channels, then sell it at a discount. Some of the food that comes from private labels are repackaged under the Daily Choice brand.

When a News 8 crew stopped by the Marne facility, the team was processing 30 pound bulk bags of chicken nuggets that had been overproduced for a food service chain.

“It would otherwise go to a landfill,” Kimberly Jones, director of sales and purchasing for Natural Choice Foods and Daily Deals, told News 8. “We purchased that, we have an inspected by the USDA or FDA and once they give us the seal of approval, we package that out from the 30 pound bags into 5 pound bags.”

The food is then sold at Daily Deals or through other secondary market channels. A lot of the products gets sent to food deserts in the country via discount stores that don’t have access to normal retail channels, Jones explained.

Natural Choice Foods says it has kept millions of pounds of food out of landfills, processing about 200,000 cases of food each week.

“It means a better future for our children and our families,” Jones said. “We’re able to take food that would otherwise be disposed of and find ways to safely package it and put it back out into the market, which also allows people who are maybe struggling financially. We are able to give them center-of-plate proteins at a price that they can’t otherwise find through normal retail channels.”

The company has five Daily Deals stores in Muskegon, Allendale, Greenville, Wyoming and Comstock Park.

Jones anticipates future expansions at the Marne facility as its work grows in the secondary market.

“What we hear from our customers is that … discount stores are seeing more people looking for alternatives,” she said. “With the massive food inflation we saw in the last two years, people are looking for other ways to help stretch that budget, so they’re visiting other discount stores, other retailers rather than just traditional retailers.”

As the community celebrates Earth Day, she encouraged people to check out local discount stores as a way to stretch their budgets.