You can use them at home
Your grounds can be added to your compost pile, used in your garden, or dropped in your curbside organics bin. For more details on adding to your compost pile or using in your garden, check out our homeowner guidance here!
You can use them to supplement your backyard chickens’ diet
Remember that your Food Grounds are a mix of the food you couldn’t or didn’t eat and best used as a feed ingredient, not a full feed. You likely want to include other feed in your chickens’ diet too. There are some scraps that can be harmful and potentially toxic to chickens, like avocado pits and onions, so you’ll want to be careful adding those types of scraps, just as you might not feed them directly to your chickens if you didn’t have the Mill.
It may also be best to not add any foods that you wouldn’t feed directly to your chickens if you didn’t have a Mill — this is not the case when you send Food Grounds to us because concentrations of these foods in our final commercial feed are negligible, rendering them harmless. That said, it is important to abide by the Food Library (in the app) if you are using Mill pickups.
We can turn them into food for chickens
Don’t have a use for your Food Grounds at home? Opt into Mill pickups. Send them to Mill so they can go back to the farm as food for chickens. Mill pickups include home pickup (just request it in the app) with postage-paid boxes and liners. We receive shipped Food Grounds at our feed manufacturing facility where we turn them into a safe and nutritious chicken feed. The facility inspects and aggregates Food Grounds, before removing contaminants, screening, pasteurizing, and homogenizing them to make a feed ingredient. From there, they are delivered to Wilcox Farms in Roy, Washington (an hour south of Seattle). You can learn more about our farm partners here.