Some of the issues contributing to food waste in developed nations included a lack of storage facilities and infrastructure. Between 20 and 30 percent of food waste occurs before it ever reaches the consumer. Cutting food waste upstream would have significant impacts on both energy use and food security.

McKinsey identified a lack of information as a significant barrier when it comes to food waste.  Without proper tracking and monitoring mechanisms there is no way to properly account for food waste at each stage in the supply chain. “Gathering data within and across countries will be crucial to support concerted efforts to reduce food waste.” Measuring food waste is important to ensure technologies are applied in the right way.

Another important issue to resolve is that we don’t price goods at the appropriate level. The McKinsey report explains that “removing agriculture, energy, and waste subsidies and putting the price of $30 per tonne on carbon emissions would significantly improve the attractiveness of productivity opportunities to private-sector invenstors.” This is important for the consumer as well. We would treat food resources differently if they reflected the true cost.

The take away message is that food waste is a huge opportunity– a 252 billion dollar opportunity to be exact. Forward thinking operators and executives, especially in the foodservice realm, can achieve significant savings by using food resources more efficiently and cutting waste out of the picture.

From the study:

The calculated progressive increase of food waste suggests that the US obesity epidemic has been the result of a ‘‘push effect’’ of increased food availability and marketing with Americans being unable to match their food intake with the increased supply of cheap, readily available food. Thus, addressing the oversupply of food energy in the US may help curb the obesity epidemic as well as decrease food waste, which has profound environmental consequences.

After looking at how much total food was produced in the U.S., and how much was converted metabolically into weight gain, the researchers were able to determine how much food was leftover as waste (based on calories produced).

The figure was 40%.

This is a big number – it represents massive resource consumption, great inefficiency, and environmental loss. 

For chefs and managers, what is the takeaway?

That we have a food system producing tons of food we don’t use in America and - if operators could waste less by tracking food waste and preventing it - we would have more food dollars available to invest in quality and variety.   Moreover, the availability of excess food may be a contributor to the obesity epidemic in America.

For so many reasons, working to prevent and minimize food waste is the right approach!

* That’s an impossible goal, we can’t run out of food! How can we reduce food waste to zero when we have no control over guests and it’s difficult to match production and demand perfectly?

* That’s an easy goal, I’ll just send everything to composting! If you put all your food waste in compost you can legitimately claim that you are sending “zero waste” to the landfill.

The reality is that achieving “true” zero food waste lives somewhere between these two perspectives.

Yes, you are headed in the right direction to become a “Zero Food Waste” operation by composting and sending zero food waste to a landfill. Composting takes effort but it delivers major benefits by reducing methane gas emissions at landfills.

However, even if you compost 100% of your pre and post-consumer food waste, you can’t declare victory and move on. Why not? Because composting is food waste diversion; it is not food waste reduction.

Definition of Zero Waste: to minimize waste, reduce consumption, maximize recycling/diversion and ensure that products are made to be reused, repaired or recycled back into nature or the marketplace. In other words, aiming to eliminate rather than manage waste.

A true “Zero Food Waste” initiative requires that you focus on both reduction and diversion. If you view composting as an excuse for not having a food waste reduction program, you are missing an opportunity and may inadvertently “greenwash” the situation.

So what does a waste reduction program involve? The core element is food waste tracking – daily tracking for pre-consumer food waste and periodically for post-consumer waste. If you can’t measure your food waste, you can’t begin to manage it. Once you start tracking food waste, you have the ability to focus employees and guests on the issue, diagnose problems and set goals for improvement.

So, is Zero Food Waste possible? Absolutely. Provided you are focusing on source reduction (through food waste tracking) and have a full composting program for pre and post-consumer food waste.

More Information:

Food Waste Tracking Systems: Visit www.leanpath.com

Composting Information: Visit www.findacomposter.com

Excerpt from LeanPath’s Food Waste Flyer Vol. 6   http://www.leanpath.com/lpweb/newsletter_vol_6.htm

The best solution is to reuse service ware – convert from disposables to durables.  But this is not be possible in many scenarios.

The alternative is to buy environmentally preferable disposables, but this can be tricky.  Is paper always better than plastic?  Is plastic always better than foam?  What happens if the paper is bleached or coated?

Here are two resources to help you consider the pros and cons of your purchasing decisions:

• Healthcare Without Harm has created an excellent whitepaper that digs into the complexity of these issues and should be read by all foodservice operators.  Download it here.

• The City of Portland, Oregon has developed a whitepaper titled “Compostable Plastic: Does it Work in Portland.”   It identifies some challenges associated with bio-plastic disposables.  While I’m confident bio-plastic disposables deserve consideration as part of an overall  foodservice packaging strategy, operators definitely need to think about the issues in this whitepaper.  Specifically, how will these disposables integrate into the local composting, recycling and trash collection infrastructure?

Both of these resources offer pragmatic “news you can use.”

There is also a larger, more theoretical discussion going on in the industry.  It has to do with the carbon footprint of various compostable disposables v. traditional options.  Not everyone agrees on how to interpret the science that’s been completed, but there is a lot of data out there.  While this consensus emerges, most will at least agree that oil is a non-renewable  resource so we can’t build our future assuming we can throw away foam and plastic forever.

ARAMARK Higher Education, a world leader in providing professional services to more than 600 colleges and universities throughout North America, has partnered with Clean Air-Cool Planet (CA-CP), the leading science-based non profit organization dedicated solely to finding and promoting solutions to global warming, to support CA-CP’s development of the “CHarting Emissions from Food Services” (CHEFS) food service carbon calculator.

To measure carbon impacts precisely, locations need detailed informaton on waste, water and energy.  Water and energy data can be collected from utility meters and bills, just as total waste figures may be collected from your garbage hauler.  However, it’s much tougher to get specific information about food waste generation over time.   And this is critical data if you want to get your carbon calculations correct because food waste has a disproportionately large impact on green house gas generation.

To get this specific data, you can use automated food waste tracking systems (such as those from LeanPath).   These make it easy to continuously monitor food waste generation.  By tracking food waste daily, operators can reduce raw material costs for food (2-4% savings on purchases) while also tracking carbon outputs for purposes of social responsibility reporting .