Food Waste Focus

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LeanPath just received a very nice write up from Christina Williams at Sustainable Business Oregon.  The article talks about the new product from LeanPath, called WasteLOGGER.
http://sustainablebusinessoregon.com/articles/2010/06/leanpath_launches_food_waste_tracking_software.html

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 [...]

What is “Utilization”?
When chefs talk about “utilization”, they’re usually referring to finding a “profitable or practical use” for the food they purchase.
The most obvious use is within the menu item for which the food was purchased. But often there is more food purchased than ultimately is [...]

Have you seen it yet?  The new Ziploc commercial on food waste?
Ziploc is a company that for many years has promoted their products as keeping your food fresh, longer.  But now they have created a new commercial that talks about the financial perils of not storing food properly.  In their latest commercial they have several [...]

New York City – the Big Apple…wasting apples?  Is this true?  No.  But it’s an excellent video demonstrating the huge amount of food waste generated.  Check it out:  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2V5fKX_U3qY&feature=player_embedded
Sometimes it takes an example like this to help everyone get a grasp on the true volume of food waste.  A single item, filling up a familiar [...]

What is “Food Rescue”?
Food Rescue: the practice of safely retrieving edible food that would otherwise go to waste and distributing it to those in need.
Why is this important? 90% of low-income households with at least one child under the age of 12 use food pantries and soup kitchens and also participate in the School [...]

Recently we have seen a lot of news articles focused on food waste.  Many studies are quoted, a lot of numbers are cited – dollars, percentages and weight.
An Australian e-newsletter, Inside Waste Weekly spoke about the sheer amount of waste produced in their country.
Research by The Australia Institute shows Australians are dumping $5.2 billion worth [...]

There are so many ways to prevent food waste – that I don’t think we could list them all. We try, however, to pass along every hint and tip we have. On this blog, we mostly focus on tips for source reduction at large foodservice operators. Sometimes we blog about ways to [...]

We tend to focus on the food waste we can see in our operations.  It’s dramatic, and often deeply disappointing.  What we can’t see as clearly is the food wasted before it ever reaches us:  at the farm, during processing, during transit.
We only get to see the food which survives the supply chain.  Whenever we or [...]

The New York Times recently wrote about a critical food waste sanitation problem that has developed in Egypt.  The background is that the Egyptian government required all pigs in the country to be slaughtered this past spring in a (misguided) effort to reduce swine flu risk. What they failed to realize was that these pigs were playing a [...]