Scrappy midcoast startup finds value in food scraps

Davis Saltonstall and Tessa Rosenberry, both age 32, started ScrapDogs Community Compost in 2018 as a subscription-based curbside composting operation, collecting food scraps from homes and businesses, turning them into compost and distributing the finished product locally. Today, operating in the Knox County town of Washington, customers include households, restaurants and institutions. Mainebiz: How did you get the idea for ScrapDogs? Tessa Rosenberry: Davis and I met in college in New York, both studying environmental science and policy. Davis Saltonstall: We were total garbage geeks and started a nonprofit in school to build zero-waste pathways for schools and nonprofits. MB: What made you garbage geeks? TR: My mom liked to garden and she made sure we got our hands dirty. As we were coming of age, there was a new wave of environmentalism around climate change. That was a big driver for me. DS: I’ve always been fascinated by garbage. It’s a really interesting way to look at the world, in terms of seeing what people think of as waste. Composting seemed like an approachable way of being in the waste management field while also making a pretty meaningful impact in terms of carbon reduction. MB: What did the rollout look like? TR: We scrounged up maybe 20 folks interested in composting, doing pickups once or twice a week. A lot of companies like us — small-scale curbside composters or community-scale composters — operate in more densely populated spaces. It was a bit of a risk to try it here, where it was more rural and people commonly have space to compost themselves. We gave everyone a bucket and partnered with a tiny nonprofit that had a site in Camden, where we had a 10-foot by 30-foot space to start our compost pile. DS: Which we outgrew within three months, hitting five to 10 yards of food waste per month. Around the same time, we received a waste diversion grant from the state with a partner, Bo Lait Farm in Washington. That became the new compost site and provided additional capacity, allowing us to take more customers. We grew the business, serving 150 to 200 people, until the pandemic, when we took a break for six months. MB: What did the restart look like? DS: We rented a warehouse, bought a dishwasher and invested in customer resource management software. Two or three years after our break, we licensed our own compost facility. Today we’re hovering at 800 folks with quite a few more larger contracts. We make 600 to 800 yards of finished compost and employ four to six people, depending on the season. We have a fleet of vehicles of different sizes to do pickup. MB: What’s your facility like? TR: We have a large paved area to manage our open windrows — six to eight feet tall and 100 to 150 feet long. At any given time, we have four to eight piles of food scraps mixed with wood chips and manures of varying recipes. We mix the piles and turn them with a skid steer. Once the process is completed, we let the compost cure, then screen it through a large trommel screener that pulls out lingering larger wood chips or bones. MB: To what do you attribute demand? DS: Large industrial customers often look for ways to creatively use that waste product or to better manage the volume of food scraps coming out of their kitchens. Households are motivated by having more compost and by the ease of our model. MB: Are you profitable? TR: It’s a small-margin business. We want to balance the priorities of providing a clean product but also make it as accessible as possible financially. We offer a wide range of price points and try to be flexible on pricing, especially with larger contracts. We didn’t get into composting for the profit.     MB: Plans for the future? DS: We’re thinking strategically about another growth moment to meet new demand associated with the food waste ban coming down the pike in 2030. [In 2025, the Maine legislature passed a law designed to help large food institutions divert food waste to organic recyclers, beginning 2030.] TR: The legislation is driving us to right-size our operation to make sure we can accommodate larger food waste producers. That’s on our minds as far as our fleet and our team. At the same time, that material will mean more finished compost. So in parallel, we’re exploring bagged and retail compost sales. MB: You work outside a lot. What’s your sunscreen sitch? TR: We’ve got sunscreen in every vehicle.