Food Waste Focus

The problem:  Take-out customers place a unique demand on foodservice operations, requiring single-use packaging which costs operators big dollars and leads to extensive waste compared to reusable alternatives. For years there weren’t many good solutions to this problem.
The good news: Some operators (specifically, those with repeat customers and warewashing capabilities) can reduce this take-out waste [...]

Salad Bar: A thorny issue
When starting a tracking/prevention program, it’s often the salad bar items them can be targeted early for an easy win. Why? Many cafe operations deem the salad bar easy to do, you set it up, keep it full and then throw it away.  It’s often not till we start tracking these items [...]

When tracking food waste, it’s invaluable to compare recent weeks against each other. Using a tool we call a Comparison Report you can highlight week to week changes and identify specific areas that are getting better as well as those that have gotten worse.
With ValuWaste Advantage 4, operators now have the ability to create Comparison [...]

Breakfast: Cutting the Pork
When starting a tracking/prevention program, it’s easy to overlook wasted breakfast meats. Why? Many cafe operations are focused on high volume lunch service, so the few stations that are open in the morning get setup early, loaded with par levels, so staff can focus on the upcoming lunch service.  However, if operators review [...]

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 will [...]

We just received these great Hints and Tips from some of our newest accounts.  We would like to share them with you:
“Schmoosh Pie” -  take day old pies that look tired and use a potato masher to break them up (“smoosh”).  Place contents in a cup and top with whipped cream.  Sell in the grab [...]

Helene York from Bon Appetit penned an excellent essay for the Atlantic Monthly’s online publication titled “Waste Not, Warm Not: Cutting Dining Hall Scraps.”
It’s an excellent summary of the challenges facing volume foodservice operators.   We developed these additional thoughts in response to Helene’s article:
As Helene’s comments suggest, food waste from volume kitchens is an often [...]

Day of the Week Waste Reports – Match Waste and Menus
Many operators have menus that stay mostly the same day-to-day while others run cycle menus and specials that create regular change.  Regardless of which type of menu you have, it’s very useful to review waste by day of the week.  This [...]

Timing is Everything: Watch the Calendar
We’ve found that chefs who are successful at maximizing sales and reducing waste are, in most cases, very good at predicting customer demand. The more accurately we can forecast demand, the less likely we are to have leftover items that become waste. The only thing you can count about customer [...]

In February 2010, we wrote a post about Food Holidays as possible reuse opportunities.  We had great response and wanted to continue posting about these for this month and next.
We mention these holidays, because they are fun (of course!), but also because incorporating these dates into your menu can help to reduce food waste by [...]