Food Waste Focus Blog

At LeanPath, we’re excited that World Food Day, October 16^th, has once again arrived. Given the need to sustainably feed 9.6 billion citizens by 2050, and the many challenges in the global food system that we currently face, it is indeed an important event on the calendar – and it means a lot to us.

Pictured: EMIES Award Winners. Michael Robb, LeanPath Business Development Manager, Second from left

The San Diego Food System Alliance has recognized LeanPath with its Distinguished Program "EMIES" Award. 

The world received a major wake-up call this week with the release of the Global Warming of 1.5°CReport from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), which reports that severe impacts of global warming will happen much sooner than ever imagined.

Oct. 9, 2018 - The James Beard Foundation today announced the launch of Waste Not, a multi-year campaign designed to encourage culinary professionals and home cooks to reduce food waste. LeanPath is the foundation’s official food waste tracking partner and is providing tracking technology and analytics for the campaign’s new “Creating a Full-Use Kitchen” curriculum for culinary professionals.

There are three big reasons the buffet is a key source of food waste.

First, it’s challenging to match supply and demand in an all-you-care-to-eat format. The default is overproduction: better to have too much on display than disappoint a customer with too little. 

Second, a buffet has to be aggressively merchandised. Half empty pans and blank spots on the line kill the look of a bountiful buffet. 

And third, when faced with that bounty, customers have a hard time gauging their own appetite and will often simply take more than they can eat, leading to excessive plate waste.

The good news is that you don’t have to sacrifice customer satisfaction or the visual appeal of a buffet to dramatically cut food waste. Pulling best practices gleaned from LeanPath’s decade-plus experience in food waste prevention, as well as intelligence from The World Wildlife Fund and The Rockefeller Foundation, we offer a new, free whitepaper for chefs and managers.