Uneaten and thrown away: how New York wasted 5,000 migrant meals in one day

New York City pays tens of thousands of dollars a month for meals meant to feed migrants that are instead never eaten and thrown away, according to internal company data reviewed by The New York Times.

The meals are provided by DocGo, a medical services company that won a $432 million no-bid contract from the city to provide broad-based migrant care despite having no experience doing so.

DocGo receives up to $33 per day per migrant for providing three meals per day to each of the approximately 4,000 migrants in its care. From Oct. 22 to Nov. 10, more than 70,000 meals were recorded as “wasted” by DocGo, according to internal company data obtained by The Times.

At $11 per meal, the maximum rate allowed under the contract, the wasted food over that 20-day period would cost taxpayers about $776,000, or about $39,000 per day. At that rate, the bill for the wasted food would exceed $1 million a month — just as Mayor Eric Adams is making billions of dollars in cuts to help pay for the city’s spending on migrant care.

A spokesperson for the city’s Department of Housing Preservation and Development, which oversees the $432 million DocGo contract, said the company recently started ordering fewer meals to reduce waste. year.

City officials say DocGo has lowered the average price per meal to $7.82. If we look at the number of wasted meals shown in the DocGo documents, that would amount to about $28,000 in wasted food per day, or about $800,000 per month.

Councilor Gale Brewer, chair of the Oversight and Investigations Committee, said it was insulting that migrant meals were ending up in the bin at a time when libraries, schools and waste collection services are facing deep cuts.

“It is very expensive for the taxpayer,” Ms Brewer said, adding: “We are asking for cuts while we are wasting food.”

DocGo officials have not been accused of wrongdoing, and there is no evidence the company is intentionally overbilling the city for uneaten meals. The contract stipulates that food costs are to be treated as so-called pass-through costs to the city, with no profits going to the company.

Company officials have downplayed the complaints, saying reporters had focused on a few unfortunate “guests” — the word DocGo uses for the migrants in its care — and ignored an otherwise good record, as evidenced by internal company investigations.

Some food waste may be unavoidable. Many migrants are not there when meals are served, especially during the day when they are at work or looking for work, and many cook for themselves in their hotel rooms.

But the underlying problem seems to be the food itself. Some migrants have said they became ill after eating the meals; others have reported quality issues such as mold.

DocGo officials are aware of long-standing problems surrounding food quality, but any attempt to improve these does not appear to have had much effect: on one day, November 6, more than 5,000 meals were thrown away, it appears from the data.

City officials and DocGo have not disputed the authenticity of the company’s internal documents about food waste obtained by The Times. But they claimed, without providing any evidence, that 93 percent of the food the company serves to migrants is consumed.

“The data presented by The New York Times has again been taken out of context and is not accurate,” Rob Ford, a spokesperson for DocGo, said in a statement. “DocGo continuously monitors food consumption and works on behalf of NYC to proactively identify savings opportunities”

Yet DocGo’s internal database, which covered hotels in and around New York City, the Hudson Valley, the Capital Region and Western New York, contained very specific accounts of how thousands of uneaten meals were thrown away.

“24 Chicken Alfredo & 24 Spaghetti Chicken Dinner Wasted Friday,” says a recent service report from a Western New York hotel. Another report reviewed by The Times called it a “normal evening” when 110 dinner meals — at a hotel with a reported total population of about 230 — were thrown out at the Holiday Inn in downtown Albany on Nov. 12.

A DocGo supervisor at the Brooklyn Vybe Hotel, which records show houses about 200 migrants, wrote in an Oct. 31 shift report that 184 meals were wasted at lunch alone.

The supervisor nevertheless checked the “Yes” box when answering whether the migrants enjoyed the food – a common response from supervisors despite large-scale evidence to the contrary, including their own written comments.

At the Red Roof Plus in suburban Buffalo, a DocGo supervisor wrote in her notes in an Oct. 24 shift report that the migrants “hate the food.”

“Customers are angry and claim the food contains mold and is making them sick,” she wrote, checking the “Yes” box to see if the migrants enjoyed the food. The box was similarly flagged by a supervisor at a Quality Inn in Buffalo, where she noted that 74 meals were thrown away, including 20 breakfast sandwiches, 26 beef enchiladas and eight trays of vegetables.

Last summer, The Times visited Ramada Plaza in Albany, where migrants living there complained about their treatment and the food. Some of them followed with more complaints and evidence that food was wasted. Two former DocGo subcontractors also told The Times they saw uneaten meals being thrown at hotels in Albany on a regular basis.

“The first day I ate this food, they had to take me to the hospital,” said Rodney, 38, a migrant from Port-au-Prince, Haiti. As he spoke, he wore a special belt around his stomach that he says helps him deal with the horrible gas the food gives him.

A Venezuelan migrant filmed what he said were boxes of food being thrown into the dumpster at the Ramada, where records show around 180 migrants have stayed in recent months.

“Look how they throw away the food because no one eats it,” the migrant says in Spanish on the video. “This food is pure waste.”

The Times has identified the migrants only by their first names, or allowed them to comment anonymously, out of concern that making their full names public could jeopardize their status or harm them.

Food waste was practically a side note at the dilapidated Super 8 in Schenectady County on Oct. 23, when a supervisor reported to DocGo that the “hotel has a lot of problems, such as lots of bed bugs and broken door locks,” a need “to be cleaned more often,” and a security camera that is ‘really spotty’.

The supervisor seemed to celebrate the fact that only 10 of 75 halal meals were thrown away, although dozens of uneaten “Latina” meals brought the total number of wasted lunches that day to 80.

In many cases, the migrants find ways to cook their own food in their rooms, reports and interviews show.

“Almost every resident has cooking equipment in their room,” the Red Roof Plus supervisor at Buffalo wrote in late October.

In response to the outrage over the food, DocGo officials promised to make improvements. In mid-August, the company’s then-CEO Anthony Capone promised that DocGo would introduce new options, including halal food for Muslim migrants and offerings that the heavily Hispanic population would appreciate.

“The food vendors who would want them are the ones who will now get them on a daily basis,” Mr. Capone said. told WNYT in Albany.

Soon, local vendors were serving food that migrants loved. One of the new providers was Empanada Llama, a Peruvian restaurant that served Latino-oriented dishes in a buffet style.

“They said, ‘You bring home-cooked food. This is so good,” the restaurant’s co-owner, Maria Lloyd, recalled the migrants telling her.

But then she said DocGo asked her to create labels with calorie counts and nutritional contents and to put the meals in individual containers. While the catering business was a godsend in a city where restaurants are still trying to recover from the downturn of the coronavirus pandemic, Ms. Lloyd, who had only been serving the food for a few weeks, decided it wasn’t worth the effort and quit she.

It was around the same time that Mr. Capone abruptly resigned after admitting he had done so wrongly claimed an AI-related degree on his resume.

Susan Beachy research contributed.