Food Waste Intelligence

The world received a major wake-up call this week with the release of the Global Warming of 1.5°CReport from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), which reports that severe impacts of global warming will happen much sooner than ever imagined.

Oct. 9, 2018 - The James Beard Foundation today announced the launch of Waste Not, a multi-year campaign designed to encourage culinary professionals and home cooks to reduce food waste. LeanPath is the foundation’s official food waste tracking partner and is providing tracking technology and analytics for the campaign’s new “Creating a Full-Use Kitchen” curriculum for culinary professionals.

There are three big reasons the buffet is a key source of food waste.

First, it’s challenging to match supply and demand in an all-you-care-to-eat format. The default is overproduction: better to have too much on display than disappoint a customer with too little. 

Second, a buffet has to be aggressively merchandised. Half empty pans and blank spots on the line kill the look of a bountiful buffet. 

And third, when faced with that bounty, customers have a hard time gauging their own appetite and will often simply take more than they can eat, leading to excessive plate waste.

The good news is that you don’t have to sacrifice customer satisfaction or the visual appeal of a buffet to dramatically cut food waste. Pulling best practices gleaned from LeanPath’s decade-plus experience in food waste prevention, as well as intelligence from The World Wildlife Fund and The Rockefeller Foundation, we offer a new, free whitepaper for chefs and managers.

More large companies are measuring food waste, a major development in reaching the UN's goal to halve food waste by 2030, a new report illustrates.

Three years ago, the United Nation’s outlined its Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), which includes Target 12.3’s call to halve food waste and reduce food loss by 2030. We now have an update on progress.

The five dining halls on Arizona State University’s Tempe campus turn out close to 12,000 meals per day. They had tracked food waste manually before adopting LeanPath in February 2017. ASU is also using LeanPath's post-consumer waste tracker, Spark.

"LeanPath is a lot easier than manual tracking. Easier than we anticipated,” says Aramark foodservice director Kirby Lannom. “I thought it would be difficult to get employees to buy in and use it, but it didn’t take any time.”