The Spare Food Co. Awarded National Premier, Inc. Contract for Better Beef Products
February 25, 2026 | 6 min to read
Agreement Expands Access to Spare™ Burger and Spare™ Ground Across Healthcare, Higher Education, and Corporate Dining
NEW YORK — The Spare Food Co.® has been awarded a national contract with Premier, Inc., one of the largest healthcare group purchasing organizations in the U.S., significantly expanding national access to its chef-crafted better beef products. Starting March 1, 2026, Spare™ Burger and Spare™ Ground will be available to Premier’s member network of healthcare accounts and non-healthcare foodservice operations, including colleges and universities, K–12 schools, senior living communities, corporate kitchens, regional dining groups and more.
Designed as a true one-for-one replacement for conventional ground beef, Spare Burger and Spare Ground require no new equipment, retraining, or workflow adjustments. Made simply from responsibly raised, grass-fed beef and 30% roasted surplus vegetables, Spare Beef is not a plant-based alternative or imitation product — it is real beef and real vegetables, combined. The result delivers the same culinary performance and versatility chefs rely on, while offering fewer calories, lower cholesterol, and less saturated fat than 100% ground beef.
All products maintain a short, clean ingredient list; are free of ultra-processed ingredients; allergen-free; and Halal certified — attributes especially relevant in healthcare and institutional environments where nutrition standards, procurement requirements, and operational consistency are critical.
This contract builds on strong, foodservice-first momentum for Spare. The company’s original product, Spare Starter — a chef-crafted, versatile, vegan meal starter made from surplus farm produce — validated Spare’s core approach: reducing waste, streamlining labor, and meeting sustainability goals with clean ingredients and without sacrificing flavor or flexibility. As culinary teams adopted Spare Starter in large-scale kitchens, a clear pattern emerged: in a majority of applications, chefs were using it specifically to reduce the amount of animal protein in recipes that traditionally relied on 100% ground beef. That real-world insight directly informed the development of Spare Burger and Spare Ground — not to create an imitation product, but to offer a straightforward combination of real beef and vegetables that works exactly like conventional ground beef, helping kitchens reduce beef usage, food waste, and carbon emissions while fitting seamlessly into existing menus and workflows.
“From the beginning, we’ve focused on creating food that works in real kitchens — delicious and made from simple ingredients, implementable at scale and under real-world operational constraints, and measurably better than the products they are intended to replace,” said Adam Kaye, Chef and co-founder of The Spare Food Co. “This contract with Premier validates that approach at a national level. It proves you can deliver a familiar, better-tasting product made with only beef and vegetables, that operators trust and diners genuinely enjoy and help meet the demand for healthier, more plant-forward meals without asking diners to make dramatic shifts in how they eat.”
In practice, chefs use Spare Burger and Spare Ground exactly as they would conventional ground beef — as a true one-for-one replacement in burgers, meatballs, sauces, chili, tacos, and other composed dishes. By simply substituting Spare Beef in place of traditional ground beef, operators can meaningfully reduce beef volume and food waste while maintaining consistency across recipes and meeting diner expectations.
Spare Beef products are already on menus at leading higher-education institutions including Princeton University, Syracuse University, Vanderbilt University, and the University of Massachusetts Amherst, in partnership with ISS Guckenheimer and their leading corporate clients, and at companies such as LinkedIn and Kirkland & Ellis. Additional volume continues to expand across foodservice operators and healthcare-focused environments nationwide. National distribution through leading broadline partners, including US Foods and Sysco, has further accelerated adoption.
With the popularity of Spare Burger at these locations, Spare kept hearing requests from diners to purchase these products for use at home. Spare Burger is now also available direct-to-consumer through Misfits Market.
Founded by brothers Adam Kaye, a chef formerly of Blue Hill at Stone Barns and co-creator of wastED, and Jeremy Kaye, formerly of Patagonia and Nike, The Spare Food Co. is built on the belief that overlooked ingredients represent opportunity, not waste. By combining culinary expertise with mission-driven business leadership and leveraging existing national processing infrastructure, Spare is rapidly scaling high-performing food solutions designed for large, complex foodservice systems.
The Premier contract accelerates Spare’s mission to make “better beef” the default choice for institutions seeking practical, scalable solutions that align health, sustainability, and operational priorities.
For more information, visit www.sparefood.com.
About The Spare Food Co.®
It is well documented that around 1/3 of all food that is produced is wasted, and that reducing food waste is shown to be one of the most effective ways that we can reverse the effects of climate change. Where others see waste, The Spare Food Co. sees overlooked ingredients and untapped goodness. The company works directly within existing agricultural and food manufacturing systems to rescue surplus produce, underutilized parts of plants, and edible co-products, transforming them into thoughtfully designed food solutions that perform in professional kitchens. By combining culinary expertise with a pragmatic, scale-first approach, Spare develops products that help reduce waste and environmental impact while delivering the flavor, familiarity, and consistency required in everyday foodservice and consumer settings. Its mission is simple: to make the overlooked essential, and to prove that better food systems start with better use of what we already have.