Food Waste Focus

Every year a few key themes emerge at National Restaurant Show despite the massive scale of the event. While “green” topics have been featured for several years, this was the first year that the discussion in Chicago evolved from a product-centered conversation (compostable disposables, organic foods, etc.) to focus on green operations.  The reality is [...]

We’re proud to announce that LeanPath will be previewing our new food waste tracking software product at the National Restaurant Show starting this weekend (May 22-25). The software is called WasteLOGGER and it’s designed for operations with lower volumes of production and food waste than those that use our fully automated system called ValuWaste.   WasteLOGGER [...]

Practice Greenhealth recently released a 10-Step Guide to Foodservice Composting.  Although it was written specifically with healthcare foodservice in mind, all the content should be generally applicable to most volume foodservice operations. Download Practice Greenhealth Guide here: Composting 10StepGuide Practice Greenhealth offers many other excellent resources on waste management. Visit their site at www.practicegreenhealth.org.

Which foodservice waste items qualify as “compostable?” The answer depends on who will handle the composting – keep in mind that many commercial composters handle yard waste but cannot or will not accept food. Those that do handle food waste will usually accept all food waste (pre-consumer and post-consumer) as well as plant-based compostable disposables [...]

Once managers and staff members begin a waste tracking/prevention program, we often see a spike in “expired” products – items which have exceeded acceptable time limits.  The reason is that these teams are doing a great job at safely saving leftovers but they need to identify enough good opportunities to utilize the leftovers before they [...]

Last fall, researchers from the National Institutes of Health published a fascinating paper about food waste: The Progressive Increase of Food Waste in America and Its Environmental Impact. I met one of the lead authors, Kevin Hall, at a forum convened by the EPA in March focused on food waste reduction and diversion. From the [...]

How do you know that you’re focusing on the right waste management priorities? Want to be greener and wondering how to get there? Can’t afford to lose any time and need the biggest win for limited dollars? To answer these questions, you don’t need to start from scratch. Operators should check out a new class [...]

LeanPath president, Andrew Shakman recently attended the WasteExpo in Atlanta Georgia. He spoke on a panel titled “Food Scrap Composting: The Wave of the Future?” with John Connolly of JFConnolly & Associates and Tim Lesko of Greenco Environmental (Georgia’s only permitted composting facility).  The session focused largely on commercial food scrap diversion as opposed to [...]

Soon after you start tracking food waste you run into a question about units of measure.  Do I want to track weight, servings, each/count, or volume.  The answer is to track waste in the form that makes the most sense for that item and then convert it to a common metric for comparison purposes.  For [...]

Micah Cavolo is the Executive Chef with Bon Appétit Management Company @ Intel Jones Farm Campus in Hillsboro, Oregon. Background Micah has been with Bon Appetit for the past 15 years and at Intel for the past six. He has a long history in corporate foodservice and has been in the culinary industry for 20 [...]