Pambiche reduces food waste through composting and ingredient reuse

Roseanne Romaine and John Maribona have spent 26 years running Pambiche, their Cuban restaurant in Portland, and for much of that time they watched heavy trash cans leave the kitchen each night. Now they are part of a citywide push to change that, PIRG reported, joining a 2022 Portland Metro program that requires large food-waste generators to sort scraps for donation or compost instead of sending them to landfills.

The numbers behind their decision are staggering. Across Oregon, an estimated 800,000 tons of food goes uneaten each year, yet the Metro program has already kept more than 50,000 tons out of landfills in just three years. For Romaine, the sight of those overflowing bins was personal.

“How much food we were watching go back into the trash really made an impression on me,” Romaine said. “You could just see it because the guys would be picking up the trash cans and they’re so heavy.”

The Weight of the Trash Cans

Romaine and Maribona bring more than three decades of combined food-industry experience to the kitchen, and they operate what they call a “full circle menu.” Rather than treating scraps as garbage, they treat every ingredient as a resource with a second life. Instead of buying seed oils, they render and reuse the fats from their own beef, pork, and chicken.

“Every product produces a byproduct. It’s not waste,” Maribona said.

Even citrus gets the full treatment. When staff juice lemons, they do not toss the peels. They zest the skins, dehydrate them, and grind them into seasoning.

Modern metro train in a metropolitan city station in portland usa

“We could just juice the lemons and throw everything in the garbage,” Romaine acknowledged, “but we could also zest the skins. We can dehydrate it. We can use it for seasoning.”

Eight Hundred Thousand Tons

The scale of the problem dwarfs the progress so far. While Portland Metro’s sorting requirement has diverted over 50,000 tons since 2022, the statewide figure of 800,000 tons of uneaten food annually shows how much remains. Romaine said the opportunity to compost and reuse felt obvious.

“When we had the opportunity to reduce some of that, it just felt like the best idea,” she said. “I didn’t understand why anybody was saying no to the idea of composting our food waste.”

The economics and logistics of waste reduction are not always simple, and the couple admits the transition required patience. Staff training has been a persistent hurdle.

“We’ve had to spend a lot of time with staff explaining why we do this,” Romaine said.

Teaching the Next Generation

Maribona and Romaine suspect the resistance surprises them because younger workers should care more about environmental urgency. Yet they find many simply lack the know-how.

“It’s been hard to get people on board,” Romaine said. “It surprises me because I feel like especially people younger than me would feel like it’s more of an urgent matter as far as the environment and the amount of waste we’re producing.”

“I think people just don’t know how to do it,” Maribona said. “I think if there were resources or if it was taught in culinary, more people would do it.”

The couple traces the shift to a throwaway culture that took hold after their own generation. Born in the 1960s and raised in the 1970s, they entered the industry in the 1980s, when using every part of an ingredient was standard practice.

“We come from another generation as well, born in the 60s, raised in the 70s and coming up to this industry in the 80s,” Maribona said. “It was more common to be utilizing all of your food.”

“But things became really throwaway,” Roseanne said, “and you could see it.”

For Romaine, who grew up in a household where cooking and baking were constant, discarding edible food after all the labor of preparation feels illogical.

“Food’s always just been an important part of my life,” she said. “It’s a kind of a no-brainer.”

Keep reading