Today Sodexo expands its commitment to building a better tomorrow for the planet and its people with the launch of “Stop Wasting Food”, a campaign with one simple goal: Winning student support for cutting food waste to curb climate change.

It’s exciting that this campaign is rooted in food waste source reduction.  Specifically, on the pre-consumer side of the waste stream, Sodexo has launched a pilot program with eight college sites tracking all pre-consumer food waste every day in order measure and characterize it, with the goal of preventing, minimizing and avoiding that food waste in the future.

LeanPath is pleased to be a partner in this effort, which involves automated food waste tracking systems.

Read the full press release from Sodexo.

In fact, food waste prevention ranks at the very top of the EPAs food waste recovery hierarchy, well above other strategies including food recovery and composting. While each of these other elements are definitely valuable, waste prevention delivers the greatest benefits by far.

For example, by preventing and minimizing food waste:

• You save money. By controlling production and wasting less food, you purchase less or redeploy dollars toward higher priorities.

• You save staff time by being more efficient and not producing items you dont need.

• You save disposal costs by having less food waste volume and weight to haul away.

• You reduce resource demands on agricultural producers, allowing them to use less fertilizer, pesticide, herbicide and fuel.

• You reduce and avoid greenhouse gas emissions and toxicity from food waste downstream at landfills.

With powerful impact, why doesnt food waste prevention get more attention?

There are three reasons:

• Waste prevention isn’t visible or touchable. It’s hard to explain how the absence of something represents a huge victory when people generally want to see things in front of them.

• Some people don’t think they have much food waste or, if they do acknowledge it, believe they can’t do much to improve the situation. Of course, the reality is that every operation has actionable food waste and every operation has a chance to improve.

• Operators and consultants want to attack waste but they dont have any tools in their toolkit for waste prevention. The answer is simple and easy: the key to waste prevention is daily food waste tracking.

“We manage the things we measure.” By tracking food waste every day, you focus staff behavior and collect information to spot problems and opportunities.

Finally, food waste tracking and reporting gives you information that makes prevention highly visible and clearly illustrates the scope of the problem and the positive changes over time. Learn more about LeanPath food waste tracking systems: www.leanpath.com

Portland, Ore. -

LeanPath® proudly announces the introduction of WasteLOGGER, a software solution for food waste tracking that helps any restaurant, hotel, caterer, or foodservice operation prevent, minimize and avoid pre-consumer food waste (which includes overproduction, spoilage, expiration, trim waste). The software runs on existing computers and does not require specialized tracking equipment. WasteLOGGER was previewed at the 2010 National Restaurant Show in Chicago and will be available commercially in Summer 2010.

Food Waste Tracking: Best Practice in Waste Prevention

Food waste management is a core element of any strategy for sustainable foodservice operations and represents a significant opportunity to enhance efficiency and save resources.

“The EPA’s food waste management hierarchy prioritizes source reduction as the critical first step and best practice in food waste management” says Andrew Shakman, President and Co-Founder of LeanPath, Inc. “And the key to source reduction is daily food waste tracking – without daily information you have no way to diagnose food waste, create awareness, or begin to measure progress.”

Green recognition and certification programs (including the NRA’s Greener Restaurants Program and Green Seal’s GS-46 Standard for Green Restaurant and Foodservice Operations) both identify food waste auditing and tracking as a core best practice in any waste management effort.

Food waste is one of the most expensive hidden costs in any restaurant and foodservice operation. Food waste tracking is the simple, easy, and effective antidote. By tracking waste daily, operators can save 2-4%+ on food purchases, while also saving on disposal and labor costs and operating greener facilities.

LeanPath’s Family of Food Waste Tracking Solutions:

For Volume Foodservice & Hospitality: The patented ValuWaste® Automated System, a rugged touch-screen terminal and bench scale used to track food waste 24-7 in volume foodservice operations.

For Other Restaurants & Foodservice: LeanPath WasteLOGGER, a PC-based software tool to track food waste in small to medium-sized restaurant and foodservice operations as well as mobile catering operations, without the need for specialized tracking equipment.

About LeanPath, Inc.

Founded in 2004, LeanPath pioneered food waste tracking and offers several product solutions. Together, LeanPath WasteLOGGER and the ValuWaste System allow restaurants and foodservice operations of all sizes to select the right tools to meet their tracking and auditing needs for food waste.Contact: LeanPath, Inc. (www.leanpath.com) is a technology company providing food waste tracking systems to the restaurant and foodservice industry. LeanPath partners with leading foodservice organizations at sites in more than 24 U.S. states with customers including ARAMARK, Sodexo, Compass Group, and MGM Mirage. For additional information about LeanPath or its products contact the company by e-mail at info@leanpath.com or by phone at (877) 620-6512.

To view the press release from the LeanPath website:  http://www.leanpath.com/releases.shtml
Contact: Carolyn Burleigh, Carolyn.Burleigh@gmail.com or 503/381-1095

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This link will take you to the presentation for “ABC’s of Food Waste Management: Reduction and Diversion“:  http://www.leanpath.com/docs/LeanPath_NRA_ABCs_Food_Waste.pdf

This is the last of the three presentations.

This link will take you to the presentation for “Emerging Trends in Food Waste Management“:  http://www.leanpath.com/docs/LeanPath_NRA_EmergingTrends.pdf

Over the next few weeks we will post the other two presentations.

1) Create a written “Food Review Policy” which will be implemented after every meal service. The key aspects of this policy include:

• Bringing all overproduced, unserved food to a central location for review immediately upon conclusion of service
• Ensuring the review is conducted by a culinarian who is fully trained on food safety and HACCP requirements.
• Sort the items and document correctly for HACCP
• Determine an expected use for each retained item
• Communicate the plan

2) Be creative (within safety constraints).  Redirecting extra prepared items might seem like a challenge, but we see breakthroughs all the time. For example, one of our clients has created a café station solely as a venue for secondary uses.  Each day a team reviews saved items and brainstorms ideas to reposition the products.

3) Donate What You Cannot Use. If there is no immediate avenue for a secondary use within the operation, you can donate to a local food rescue organization.  Visit the EPA food scraps site or Food Donation Connection to learn more.

4) Track the leftovers and target future waste prevention. Track the amount of food waste electronically or on paper and use this information to focus staff behavior and minimize future overproduction. Waste prevention is always the ultimate goal.

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 plus years. His first job with Bon Appetit was at a small college in Scotts Valley, California. He then moved on Stanford University, where he became interested in the impact of food scraps on the environment. He started a composting system there as well as at his next two accounts, Pacific University in Stockton, California and at Intel in Oregon.

Experience with Waste Tracking

Chef Micah has been using LeanPath’s ValuWaste system for about a year. He reports that the system has raised awareness in the kitchen of how much product was being wasted. It has allowed his team to focus on problem areas and implement traceable results. In fact, he believes the best part of the program is the traceability back to underlying waste causes.

Initial Expectations

As with many chef customers, he was not sure what to expect from ValuWaste at the onset, but “has been very pleased with the information that I was able to get from the program”.

His biggest surprise about automated food waste tracking? “I was surprised at the steady lowering of waste as it was projected over the duration of the program. It is still going down, which makes me wonder where the bottom will be… zero waste?”

Recommendations

His advice to managers starting or already using the program is to “Be diligent at the scale. Make sure your staff understands the importance of weighing everything that goes in the trash/compost.  Use positive reinforcement to get the staff involved.”

Takeaways

Chef Micah believes that they “made great strides in reduction of batch cooked foods and beverages that would have gone unnoticed into the compost. But thanks to the ValuWaste program it made us examine and come up with a solution that in the end saved us money and time.”

“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 and go case.

Alternate:  use leftover cake and ‘smoosh’ for use a topping in pudding cups or layering in parfaits.

Similar – use leftover bread for sweet or savory bread pudding.  Make into individual cups for easier pricing.  Or, make a larger amount of bread pudding, keep warm, serve with with caramel syrup and sell portions priced by the ounce.

Use leftover oatmeal or cream of wheat as an additive to baking – i.e. muffins, quick breads.

Remember to follow the “meat handling hierarchy” for reuse:  roast, slide, dice and grind.  Each stage represents a new utilization opportunity.

Plan for a third soup each day from leftovers (a utilization item).  Garden Vegetable and Minestrone are popular utilization soups.  (Any vegetable, tomato product/sauce or pasta can be added to make a tasty Minestrone)  Baked Potato soup is another great utilization soup – any of these can be added: bacon, cheese, broccoli, sauteed onions.  Be creative!  Remember, a third soup can be a smaller quantity than the other two.  It’s just to use any leftover, overproduced product.  It can be served in only one cafe, or at a busy coffee bar, satellite area.

Rollover unused, brewed coffee into an iced product. Enhance by mixing with half and half or with flavored syrups.  This can be served from a bulk container (carafe, airpot, etc.) or cupped and sold in the grab-n-go reach-in.  If you have a slushy machine – frozen coffee is a nice summertime treat.

Eliminate hotel pans – go to smaller attractive merchandisers such as Bon Chef or Fiestaware.  It lowers merchandising pars, maintains freshness, and improves guest appeal.

If you have the ability – get and use a blast chiller to maximize your ability to chill and reuse leftover food items.

Special Hints and Tips for our Healthcare audience:

Make patient salads to order, specifically fruit salads. Maintain fruit as a separate components rather than commingling in the cup during prep.  Mix the salad for each customer to maintain freshness and avoid bleeding flavors.  Individual fruit can then be reused in other items.  Pineapple for the ham entree, orange segments in a compound salad.  They can even be placed on the salad bar as fruit salad.

Save broths prepared for special diets (low sodium, etc.) and incorporate with purchased bases or house made stock to prepare cafe soups.  Unused broths can be frozen and added to the cafe soups at a later date.  Or, build your menu to take advantage of each previous day’s overages.

Overproduced rice from the tray line – reuse in a cafe entree by sauteeing rice with veggies, make the classic fried rice, or add to soups.

Plan for a third soup each day from leftovers (a utilization item).  A third soup can be a small quantity.  It can be served in only one cafe, or at a busy coffee bar, satellite area.

VA Senior Sustainability Officer James M. Sullivan praised staff as “an excellent example to other VA facilities on how to employ innovative waste reduction strategies.”

MVAMC’s Chief of Nutrition and Food Service Barbara Hartman says that “Receiving this award recognizes and validates the importance of proper food waste management to the environment.”

View the entire notice at: www.leanpath.com/nwsltr/VA_Award.pdf

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 step can reveal waste issues that vary day-to-day due to variances in staffing, customers, schedules, and modes of operation.  Once you see a day with a waste spike, you can drill into it and figure out why its occurring.

For example, an operator reviewed a Waste by Day of Week report (they use an automated waste tracking system that provides this type of report with click of the button) and discovered that Wednesday was the day with the most waste – by a wide margin.

They then drilled into the detailed information for Wednesday and found that their waste was coming from all stations other than “Expo Cooking”.  (This is an action station that does ‘made to order’ dishes.)  They realized the Expo Cooking program (which occurred only on Wednesday and drew 600+ orders) was drawing customers away from the standing menu items at other stations and leading to much more waste at those stations.  Solution?  The chef adjusted production forecasts for the other stations on Wednesday and brought waste down dramatically.

Click here to view this report:  http://www.leanpath.com/nwsltr/fff6/dayweek.htm

Take a look at your stations, product mix, sales and especially your waste tracking sheets.  What do you see happening from day to day?  What is the reason for this?  Can something be changed to reduce the amount of waste occurring on the ‘high’ day?