Business

It’s a truth universally acknowledged that restaurants throw out a ton of food. “It’s endless amounts of waste and it’s really depressing,” said Safa Batniji, who has spent years working in food service both in front and back of the house. Every day, she sees food from people’s plates — unused ingredients, wrong orders — all tossed. Especially at larger businesses that serve up to thousands of meals per week, “It really, really adds up.”

The Cordish Companies, Live Casino & Hotel Maryland and the Anne Arundel County Local Development Council (LDC) awarded more than $18.4 million in local impact and community grants to organizations in Anne Arundel County for fiscal year 2023. This year’s grants bring the total funds generated by Live Casino & Hotel in support of Anne Arundel County organizations to more than $200 million since the casino opened nearly 11 years ago.

Two data center providers are moving forward with updated proposals to redevelop a combined 1,600 acres in Prince William County.

Thirteen Greater Baltimore firms have earned a spot on Inc. Magazine’s ranking of the fastest-growing companies in the mid-Atlantic region. The regional ranking, a spin-off of the popular Inc. 5000 franchise, was released Tuesday and shows which companies had the highest percentage revenue growth from 2019 to 2021. Overall, the 142 mid-Atlantic companies had a median growth rate of 149% and $3.9 billion in revenue.

Jody Davis didn’t know she would one day dress Maryland’s first lady, Dawn Moore, for the inauguration. She didn’t even expect to become a fashion designer. Davis, 60, originally planned to be a veterinarian. But the summer after she graduated from Western High School in North Baltimore, she started “twiddling with sewing.” She bought a yellow linen tablecloth from Goodwill Industries and transformed it into a top and skirt, which drew compliments from family, friends and even strangers.

Silver Spring developer Banneker Ventures announced Tuesday that it has received a $20 million loan from Amazon.com Inc. (NASDAQ: AMZN) to help it build 193 affordable housing units across the street from the Addison Road-Seat Pleasant Metro station in Prince George’s County. Banneker, a Black-led real estate development firm that also has an office in Southeast D.C., is the lead contractor for Park Place, a $45 million development that will rise from a vacant lot at 6301 Central Ave. in Capitol Heights. All of the units, ranging from studio to three-bedroom apartments, will be preserved as affordable for 99 years, said Banneker President Omar A. Karim.

Gaithersburg engineering contractor Amentum is leaving suburban Maryland for Chantilly, Virginia where it will consolidate its headquarters in its existing Westfields Boulevard office, Virginia and company leaders announced Monday. The move, which is expected to create 157 new Virginia jobs, comes roughly a year after Amentum closed its $1.9 billion all-cash purchase of Arlington-based PAE Inc. With that acquisition, and the September 2020 purchase of DynCorp International Inc., Amentum has grown to 44,000 employees in 85 countries and more than $9 billion in annual revenue.

After more than two decades leading downtown revitalization efforts, the head of the Ocean City Development Corporation will step down in March. Glenn Irwin, advocate for downtown redevelopment for more than 22 years, will retire from his position as executive director of the Ocean City Development Corp. (OCDC) March 31. While he remains passionate about the revitalization of the resort’s downtown, Irwin said the time had come for him to slow down.

For Jonathon Heyward, the new music director of the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra, the key word for success is community. At a news conference last week at the Joseph Meyerhoff Symphony Hall, Heyward addressed a small group of news media about what can be expected of his first season in the driver’s seat. A priority of that, he said, will be a focus on “programming that is relevant to the community,” both in “having familiar faces in the community on our stages” as well as “pre- and post-concert experiences that relate to the community.