Down a long gravel driveway on the outskirts of Columbia Falls, a series of towering mounds rises against a backdrop of pines and distant mountain peaks. Each one holds 17,000 pounds of waste — scraps and leftovers hauled in from homes, cafes, restaurants, and stores across the Flathead Valley.
It’s a small glimpse into a much bigger problem. Nationwide, nearly 40% of all food goes uneaten. That’s an estimated 95 billion pounds of food waste a year, enough to make 145 billion meals.
Alissa LaChance sees the scale of that waste up close. As founder of Dirt Rich, she spends her days turning discarded food into soil, while reckoning with just how much is thrown away.
“Owning this company has opened my eyes to the reality of food waste to a degree I never could have imagined,” she said. “I don’t even know how to state the gravity of how much we waste as a society.”
A Whitefish native, LaChance has long felt a pull toward environmental work. Since high school, she’s seen her career not just as a livelihood, but as a “soul calling” to give back to the earth.
This summer marks 10 years since Dirt Rich broke ground. In that time, the company has diverted more than 3 million pounds of organic waste from Flathead County’s landfills.
But the Dirt Rich piles didn’t always rise so high. The company started with a couple of compost bins set up at the Whitefish Farmers Market. It was Rachel Gerber, LaChance’s long-time friend, who had set up those buckets, taking away the waste and composting it for free.
One day, a representative from Xanterra — the concessionaire running the lodges and hotels in Glacier National Park — approached Gerber at the market with a question: Would she be interested in composting for them? She explained that hers was just a small-scale operation, composting about 30 pounds a week.
LaChance had recently graduated from the University of Montana when Gerber told her about the interaction. With a background in organic farming, she planned to stick to agriculture. But those plans soon changed.
“I was like ‘No, we need to make this happen for the community because this is incredibly important work,” LaChance said. “And then we pulled Dirt Rich together by the seat of our pants.”
They paid $50,000 for a 6-acre plot of land — a “gravel trash pit,” as LaChance put it — where locals had been dumping their old couches and other junk for years. Undeterred, the pair cleaned up the site, installing fencing to keep bears away from the food waste and compost. A “mostly functional” old Dodge 250 pickup served as transportation in the early years.
“Learning how to compost effectively and efficiently was definitely a process,” LaChance said. “We messed up our first batch pretty badly.”
Scaling up required new equipment, but just as important was helping the public understand how large-scale composting works. Unlike backyard bins, Dirt Rich’s high-heat system can process meat and dairy without attracting animals or producing strong odors.
A decade later, Dirt Rich now works with everyone from individual households to big-box retailers like Costco. It also continues its Whitefish Farmers Market legacy, and handles large local events like the Under the Big Sky music festival. But regardless of the company’s scale, LaChance’s focus has never shifted from the community.
“We consider ourselves a community composter,” she said. “We want to be connected to and in dialogue with the community.”
One of the biggest challenges in building strong partnerships, LaChance said, is getting people to see the value in the work. Montana has some of the lowest landfill tipping fees in the country, making it not just convenient, but also cost-effective to throw away waste.
And in a region like the Flathead Valley, where the cost of living is already high, it can be tough to convince business owners to pay extra for a sustainable service.
A big part of Dirt Rich’s pitch comes back to the community. When approaching potential partners, LaChance emphasizes the company’s local roots and commitment to keeping resources, and relationships, close to home.
“The restaurants and businesses we work with are supporting local jobs and keeping money local,” she said. “They get to see that they’re making a difference, and it makes them excited to work with us.”
Before teaming up with Dirt Rich, the baristas at Montana Coffee Traders in downtown Whitefish were managing compost themselves. They filled five-gallon buckets with used coffee grounds for local farmers to pick up whenever they had time. When Regional Manager of Café Operations Jessie Farnes learned about Dirt Rich, she saw the partnership as “a natural next step.”
Space in the café was tight, but Farnes cleared out the old buckets to make room for a Dirt Rich bin. Within months, it was filling so quickly they added a second.
At first, the cafe only composted coffee grounds. Farnes had moved from Portland, a city with a robust municipal composting system, so she knew how easily compost bins could be contaminated with non-compostable items. But through what she calls a “slow and steady” collaboration with LaChance, the program expanded to include all food waste.
Farnes credits a community-wide Q&A hosted by LaChance at Flathead Valley Community College for deepening her understanding of the composting process. Through ongoing conversations, they developed a system that worked for both sides.
She also began researching the switch to compostable packaging and utensils. That meant weighing Dirt Rich’s needs with the logistical realities of sourcing thousands of durable cups and lids each day. Today, all of Montana Coffee Traders’ hot cups are compostable, and the Dirt Rich partnership has expanded to locations across the valley.
Farnes said the partnership’s success stems from LaChance’s willingness to “do the work” of talking through what works, doesn’t work, and any concerns along the way.
“There hasn’t been a starting or end point to this partnership,” she added. “We’re constantly learning and growing together through communication.”
As the company has built deeper relationships across the valley, LaChance has also had to find ways to keep up with growing demand. She said that scaling up ultimately comes down to tools and resources. Among her proudest accomplishments is securing a loader, which has “completely transformed efficiency on site,” she explained, by reducing the number of trips that her staff must take.
“My staff had to drive a small tractor around over and over again to pick up all the waste with a tiny bucket,” she said. “Now they’re using a piece of equipment that is four times the size.”
When looking to the future, LaChance aims to at least double the 820,000 pounds of waste that Dirt Rich composts annually. But she also hopes to continue engaging with the community, educating people on soil health and empowering them to grow their own food. She believes that the growing popularity of films like “Kiss the Ground,” which highlight the role that soil plays in combatting climate change, has increased understanding and support for Dirt Rich’s mission.
She pointed to her female mentors, including the soil ecologist Nicole Masters, as essential role models in showing her how to stand firm in advocating for her work.
“As a woman, it can be hard to be heard or to feel like my voice matters,” LaChance said. “I’ve been working continuously to not worry about how I’m saying the thing that needs to be said but just saying it.”
Over time, that confidence has grown — and so has the scope of her work. What began as a personal calling has become a shared effort to rebuild relationships between the land and the community.
“This isn’t just us creating an impact, it’s us partnering with humanity,” she said. “We couldn’t do this work without partners who want to do the right thing and create the world we want to see for our kids.”