From Ship to Shore: Fighting Food Scarcity Through Surplus Meal Donations
For many cruisers, extraordinary onboard dining experiences are a fundamental part of their voyage. That’s why Carnival Corporation’s world-class cruise lines get rave reviews for serving up hundreds of millions of gourmet meals to delighted guests each year. But there’s a deeper story that makes the delicious food even more meaningful.
“It began nearly a decade ago while we were looking to cut food waste across our operations so we would have less left over,” said Giuseppe Carino, Sea-Land Experience Operations Senior Vice President at Costa Cruises. “We overhauled every aspect of how we plan, purchase, store, prepare and serve our food, which greatly reduced the amount of unserved food we had left onboard. But just like eating at home, we always have some delicious, healthy food remaining after each meal service.”
That’s when the team had an idea: Collaborate with food banks in the ports it visited to rescue the unserved meals and food portions for donation to local families in need.
“We thought it would be easy – just call the food banks and arrange to deliver the food to their facilities to help feed the community,” said Carino. “Little did we know.”
The team quickly encountered mountains of restrictive laws that, in addition to prohibiting the donations, were ill-equipped to address non-traditional food donation programs like Costa was proposing. Rather than give up and resign themselves to tossing out unserved meals, the cruise line changed tack. They began exploring how to change the outmoded laws unnecessarily prohibiting healthy, nutritious unserved cruise meals from being donated to communities facing food scarcity.
The Costa team enlisted the help of local authorities and the Fondazione Banco Alimentare food bank in Savona, Italy, who joined forces to retool overly restrictive food and beverage regulations to allow the donations. The hard work paid off. In 2017, Costa became world’s first cruise line to have established a proper, scalable regulatory framework allowing them to donate delicious, unserved ready-to-eat meals to local community food banks.
With the first successful donation program underway, the Costa team was eager to set up similar programs in other ports. Just five months after kicking off meal donations in Savona, Costa again worked with Banco Alimentare to launch the meal recovery program in a second port, Civitavecchia.
John Portelli, general manager at Roma Cruise Terminal, said, “Twice a week in Civitavecchia, nutritious surplus food and gourmet meals are offloaded from Costa ships and given to the Red Cross, Archdiocese of Civitavecchia and the Rotary Club of Civitavecchia to distribute to about 100 families. That means fewer people going to bed hungry, thanks to Costa Cruises.”
Using the Savona program as its blueprint, Costa has expanded the program to a total of 16 total ports, as of 2024. As a result of this expanded reach, Costa has donated hundreds of thousands of food portions to communities throughout the Mediterranean and the Caribbean since the program’s inception. To broaden its impact even further, Costa is working with its sister Carnival Corporation cruise lines to replicate the model globally in other cruise port communities.
Sion Riera, president of the food bank in Palma de Mallorca, which became the 16th port to benefit from the program in 2024, invited the rest of the industry to follow suit: “We welcome other cruise lines to follow Costa Cruises’ lead.”
In a world where the United Nations’ Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) estimates 40% of the global food supply is lost or wasted, innovative solutions like Carnival Corporation’s cruise meal donation program are powerful examples of how finding ways to have less left over can help drive greater food security worldwide. As the company expands the program to more global regions, it welcomes the opportunity to share its learnings within the cruise industry and beyond to foster similar meal surplus donation practices across global industry.
For more information on the company’s long-term sustainability vision, visit https://www.carnivalcorp.com/impact/.
