Food Waste Focus

I recently spoke at the Northwest Foodservice Show in Portland, Oregon and had the opportunity to meet Paul Kuck of Sustainablefoodservice.com.  He has built a site with a lot of content about the many dimensions of sustainability as they pertain specifically to foodservice and it will be a valuable resource to both operators and consultants.

Food Waste Tracking really works!  Check out this article below about Starbucks.  With just a little bit of tracking and reduction of ONE ITEM (decaf coffee), this company is going to save $400 million dollars!  What items can you track and then reduce to save money at your location?  (If you think like they did [...]

The State of Oregon, Department of Environment Quality, announced that it has awarded a waste prevention grant to the City of Hillsboro, Oregon, to work with Intel Corporation to minimize pre-consumer food waste at its Jones Farm and Ronler Acres campuses in Oregon.  Bon Appetit Management Company, which manages the food at Intel, will be [...]

What is “Sneaky Waste”? Sneaky Waste is not waste from sneaky employees. It’s the waste that sneaks up on you, at the edge of your peripheral vision, the stuff you don’t think about a lot but adds up once you track it. Sometimes when we speak to operators, they state that they ‘don’t have waste’. [...]

After we start the ValuWaste system with customers the Chef’s are often surprised by just how many of their long time employees don’t know proper pan sizes.  This can lead to waste as employees may grab and fill larger pans instead of sticking to the smaller vessels called for by recipes.  We give our customers a pan identification [...]

I spent Friday in Pennsylvania, speaking at the Philadelphia South Jersey ASHFSA Symposium.  Mary Cooley of Pennswood Village CCRC in Newtown, PA shared an interesting story with the audience at my concurrent session – she recently piloted changes to her salad bar in a senior living environment.  To reduce the risk of cross-contamination in a self-serve salad [...]

Every week I speak to foodservice operators about pre-consumer food waste (overproduction, trim waste, expired items, spoilage) and they tend to react in one of three ways.  On one end of the spectrum, they acknowledge pre-consumer food waste is a problem and also an opportunity for improvement.  On the other extreme, they underestimate the scope [...]