Food Waste Intelligence

Amid growing pressure for the healthcare sector to decarbonize, a new guide has been released offering best practices. And it advises preventing food waste as one of the most effective ways hospital foodservice can help organizations reduce their carbon footprint.

Stanford University Residential & Dining Enterprises (R&DE) recently announced a goal to reduce its emissions from food purchases 25 percent by 2030.

This announcement comes shortly after the release of Stanford R&DE’s Food Waste Prevention Playbook, a guide for campuses to operationalize best practices in minimizing food waste.

Both initiatives fall under Stanford’s Scope 3 Emissions Program which was launched in 2021 to address all the indirect emissions that are influenced by the university’s operations. This includes food-related emissions, which they have been focused on through food waste reduction targets and, more recently, commitments to reducing emissions from food purchases.

Transitioning into the new year, reducing food waste remains a trending foodservice activity because it addresses so many other trending topics: 

• Food waste prevention cuts costs as inflation continues to wear on thin margins.
• Food waste prevention is the #1 most actionable thing the foodservice industry can do to address climate change as concerns over sustainability continue to rise.
• And stopping food waste from being generated leaves valuable resources in the food system as food insecurity continues to increase around the world.

Check out the video above for some inspiration on taking action on food waste this year, and keep reading to see what foodservice prognosticators had to say about why addressing food waste will continue to be top of mind for the industry in 2023:

Today, September 29^th, we celebrate the International Day of Awareness of Food Loss and Waste, an important day which was added to the UN calendar three years ago – and we were excited to join our colleagues at the Future Food Institute in bringing this to fruition.

Three years from its creation, the need to draw attention to the scale of the food waste challenge is more important than ever.  A new report from the World Wildlife Fund, for example, notes that 40% of global food production is lost or wasted annually, with food waste alone accounting for 10% of the world’s greenhouse gas emissions. 

Thus, at a high level, with over 800 million hungry and myriad environmental externalities associated with food waste, responsible foodservice organizations already have strong incentive to focus on preventing the occurrence of food waste.

Over the past 12 months the environmental issues that have seen the most increase in concern among consumers are climate change, water shortages and food shortages, according to a new survey from market research firm Mintel.

All three of those–as well as 8 of the full 10 most pressing environmental concerns among consumers–can be directly addressed with a single initiative that has a nexus impact: preventing food waste.

These new findings, combined with other recent research showing increased awareness of food waste among consumers, reinforces the opportunity foodservice operations have to address their customer’s top-of-mind environmental concerns by addressing food waste.