Food Waste Intelligence

Inspiring and engaging your culinary team is a constant challenge in today’s kitchens. There are always so many tasks to check off, prep to get done, things to clean, and meals to cook that sometimes keeping our teams inspired and engaged falls off the radar. As kitchens begin to ramp back up production, now is the perfect time to refocus your team's efforts and continue to build that culture of  food waste prevention that you had before the foodservice industry came to screeching halt due to the pandemic.

There’s a lot of attention on carbon reduction these days, and that’s a good thing.

Because the need to reduce carbon emissions to limit global warming is clear and urgent, and like food waste reduction, is critically linked to all of the other Sustainable Development Goals.

The Paris Agreement of 2015 sought to galvanize a global response to climate change with a goal of limiting global temperature rise to less than 2°C (and preferably less than 1.5°C) over pre-industrial levels by the end of this century.

Leanpath CEO Andrew Shakman recently joined three other leaders of the global food waste movement – Tristram Stuart, UK-based activist, author and Feedback founder, Dana Gunders, Executive Director at ReFED and author of the key U.S.-focused report Wasted: How America is Losing Up to 40 Percent of Its Food From Farm to Fork to Landfill, and culinary expert Jonathan Deutsch, Drexel University Professor and Director of the Drexel Food Lab and President of the Upcycled Food Foundation – in a special educational session on accelerating food waste reduction organized by faculty at Boston University’s Gastronomy and Food Studies program.

At Leanpath, our focus is on helping large foodservice kitchens track and prevent their food waste by 50% or more. But food waste, of course, doesn’t just happen in foodservice kitchens. In fact, according to a recent report by the UN Environment Programme, the bulk of the world’s food waste comes from home kitchens: ⅓ of the 1.3 billion tonnes wasted each year globally (foodservice kitchens account for ¼ of the total).

As Leanpath's full time Executive Chef, I've trained and coached hundreds of chefs and managers on preventing food waste in their operations. One of the most persistent issues is also one of the most avoidable: food waste from items expiring in storage. Avoiding this waste takes establishing and following strict processes to ensure everything in storage is used before it can expire. Here are three questions to ask yourself or your team to find out how effective your kitchen is at avoiding expired food waste.