Months after the city voted to shutter Beaten Path Compost, Jackson DeWitt still sees yellow compost buckets on doorsteps around Gainesville.
After leaving his job as an electrician and joining the compost company in 2022, DeWitt saw the business expand from servicing 200 to 700 homes in three years.
That expansion came crashing down when the city discontinued the company’s pilot door-to-door program beginning this year. Now, he’s watching the company slowly rebuild what it’s lost.
Beaten Path has served Gainesville residents since 2018 by providing and collecting compost buckets from homes and businesses. After signing a contract with the city in 2021 that launched and funded its curbside pilot program, Beaten Path is back to where it started.
In October 2025, city commissioners voted to end Beaten Path’s pilot program by the end of the year. Composters can no longer collect yellow buckets from doorsteps, and the city no longer provides the company with funding. DeWitt and his team said they were surprised by the decision.
“They [the city] could have communicated a lot more with us, and they could have communicated a lot more with the residents who were participating in the program,” he said. “And they just didn't.”
Commissioners voted 4-2 to discontinue the contract after discovering Beaten Path was billing the city for the total number of households enrolled in the program, even though only about half of them were putting their buckets out for collection. In doing so, Beaten Path violated its contract, which was based on participation, according to a statement from the city.
Because the city organized the addresses of program participants, Beaten Path has been working to reach out to those residents in the hopes of getting them to subscribe for compost services.
Since Beaten Path’s city contract ended, a new compost company has entered the area — partnered with Alachua County, rather than the city of Gainesville. O-Town Compost, based in Orlando, launched its rural collection center program Jan. 3.
The company targets areas outside of residential Gainesville, and it hopes to combat food waste, according to members of its leadership team. Meanwhile, Beaten Path seeks to rebuild its own customer base.
Beaten Path Compost
Stephan Barron founded Beaten Path Compost in 2018, back when it only required a bicycle for bucket collection. Taking over from the former Gainesville Compost, Barron operated out of Grow Hub, a local nonprofit plant nursery, and served both single-family homes and businesses.
Environmental activism drove DeWitt’s decision to join Beaten Path, he said. Composting creates new topsoil — the nutrient-rich, uppermost layer of soil — by repurposing and blending food scraps. When DeWitt learned the Earth only has around 60 years of topsoil left, he took action, he said.
“I wanted to do whatever little tiny bit I could to slow that spiral down,” he said. “Working with Stephan was fantastic and was a really good, healing thing for me to be part of.”
Beaten Path established the curbside pilot program in 2021 as part of the city’s Zero Waste initiative.
During that time, Beaten Path became renowned for its success, DeWitt said. Third parties studied its techniques, and it was diverting food waste produced by households and businesses from landfills. The city continued to expand Beaten Path’s operations.
In 2023, the city reported the pilot program had reduced greenhouse emissions by around 37 metric tons. For comparison, the average U.S. household produces around seven metric tons of carbon dioxide from food consumption and waste each year.
Throughout the pilot program, DeWitt said, the city kept track of the participating addresses and resident contact information. It sent the list of residences to Barron, who would invoice the numbers.
The city conducted an audit of the program during summer 2025 and found that the over $164,000 it was paying for the program did not align with the number of homes actually participating in the composting services.
Only around half of the people taking part were putting buckets out for collection, the city’s public works department said. Additionally, seven in 10 respondents were not willing to pay more than $5 for the service. At the time, the city was paying almost $20 per household.
In a statement released in September 2025, the city said Beaten Path was intentionally overbilling, “rather than invoicing based on actual participation as required by the contract.”
For Gainesville Mayor Harvey Ward, the decision to sunset Beaten Path wasn’t easy, but it was necessary. Despite the city commission’s initial enthusiasm for the program, its audit showed the cost was too high.
“We were serving far too few people for far too high a price tag,” Ward said.
He saw the pilot program as an opportunity to learn about Gainesville residents’ attitudes toward a composting program. Ultimately, the pilot program’s inability to grow made it impossible to continue funding.
Shortly after the announcement of the pilot program’s end, Barron stepped down from his position at Beaten Path. George O’Brien now leads the company, and he’s still upset about the city’s statement against Barron.
A puppeteer by day, O’Brien took over the company after only being with them for a year. He shares Barron’s original vision for the company and emphasizes the importance of education above all else.
“Stephan got a really bad rap, and it was completely unfair,” O’Brien said. “Knowing him as well as I do, it made me very angry. Totally unprofessional. It seemed like something happened in a kindergarten playground.”
O-Town Compost
For Richard Devereaux, composting came after retirement — a way to give back and promote the environmental issues he had always been passionate about. When a job opened up at O-Town Compost, he got to do just that.
The Orlando-based company was founded in 2019 and expanded to cities like Tampa, Lakeland and Kissimmee before reaching Gainesville in 2024.
O-Town’s interest in Alachua County stemmed from a 2022 city ordinance requiring certain commercial establishments to collect food waste separate from other waste. The company got word of a circular economy grant in Alachua County looking for food waste solutions.
O-Town’s composting program in Alachua County is based around five rural collection centers and prioritizes unincorporated residents. The centers are scattered across the county, and residents and commercial businesses can bring their food scraps to the sites, where they are transported to Gaston Mulch & Soil for composting.
O-Town’s rural collection centers opened Jan. 3. Devereaux and other representatives handed out buckets to around 50 residents and shared information about the new program.
Because they target different populations in Alachua County, Devereaux sees O-Town as an addition to Beaten Path, rather than a competitor, he said.
“We saw ourselves as being complementary to past efforts, not to be in conflict with them,” Devereaux said.
Last year, O-Town attended the Gainesville City Commission meeting that ended with the shutdown of Beaten Path’s pilot program. O-Town advocated for the program and encouraged the city to expand its services, Devereaux said.
He hopes to see the program increase its reach even more in the coming months. Once the Alachua County program proves itself, he said, similar initiatives will pop up in neighboring counties. But progress takes time.
“Just like a newborn infant, they got to crawl before they walk, and they got to walk before they run, so it's one step at a time,” Devereaux said.
Looking ahead
As O-Town Compost educates residents about its services, Beaten Path Compost is working to rebuild relationships with subscribers. Residents can receive curbside pickup for $15 per month, while businesses can do the same for $45, in addition to other services. The company currently is not selling its compost.
Patrick Irby, the 41-year-old waste collection and alternatives manager for Alachua County, has heard complaints from Gainesville residents who don’t want to commute to deposit their food scraps. He emphasized the rural collection centers are also places to deposit hazardous materials, electronic waste and bulk waste.
O-Town’s program will go back to the county commission with its data on how much food waste the centers collected. From there, the commission will evaluate its effectiveness, deciding the next steps for the program, which, Irby said, could include improvements, expansions or reductions.
“It could be any number of results,” he said.
Contact Juliana DeFilippo at jdefillipo@alligator.org. Follow her on X @JulianaDeF58101.
Juliana is a second-year journalism student and the Spring 2026 Enterprise environment reporter. This is her fourth semester on The Alligator, and she previously served as an Avenue reporter and the Fall 2025 Avenue editor. In her free time, she loves reading, updating her Letterboxd account and doing crosswords.
