From trash to treat: food scraps at Bowling Green State University get new life as dog biscuits

Shelter dogs at Wood County Dog Shelter in Bowling Green, Ohio, will be eating well this holiday season thanks to a new initiative by the Chartwells Higher Ed Team at Bowling Green State University (BGSU).

The dining team has begun saving its leftover food scraps to turn into dog treats. They made their first batch of biscuits earlier this month as part of their campus Thanksgiving event. 

“The kitchen started saving the food waste and leftovers that could go into the recipe that we chose about two weeks before,” says Director of Marketing, Communication, and Technology for BGSU Dining Jon Zachrich. “And then our team of sustainability interns made about 250 biscuits for the first batch.” 

The treats were a hit, with students and staff quickly grabbing all of them before the end of the event.  

The team utilized recipes supplied by Chartwells that are veterinarian approved and include ingredients like cucumbers, spinach, celery and carrots. 

Those ingredients then get mixed with oatmeal, flour and eggs to form a dough that is rolled out, cut into shapes and then baked. 

As with the biscuits handed out during Thanksgiving event, sustainability interns will be responsible for preparing the treats that get delivered to Wood County. Zachrich believes that they will be able to supply around 250 to 500 biscuits weekly to the shelter depending on the amount of leftover food available. 

“We're going to start doing our first few deliveries right around the holidays, right around probably the third week of December,” says Zachrich.  “Then we're going to keep going from there.”

Currently, only one of the dining halls on campus makes the treats, however, Zachrich would love to expand the initiative to other eateries on campus and is looking at other shelters in the area they can donate to as the program grows.  

“We're trying to figure out kind of where that sweet spot is of the amount of waste that we produce compared to biscuits, but we're hoping, long term, that we could ramp up production, as we see fit,” he says.