Food Waste Intelligence

The easiest way to understand one part of the cost of doing nothing about your food waste problem is to use our Savings Opportunity Calculator. This will tell you, based on the size of your operation, how much you stand to save by preventing food waste with Leanpath. What you stand to save is another way of understanding what it’s costing you to ignore food waste.

But there’s another cost that is less precise but perhaps even more critical: every day you do nothing about food waste, you are sacrificing your competitive advantage.

With more than 420 stores in 52 markets worldwide IKEA is now two years into its ambitious program to reduce food waste in all the IKEA stores by 50% before end of August 2020. So far more than 1.4 million kilos of food have been saved since the program started, which is equivalent to more than 3 million meals (one meal equals 450 grams).

Food Matters Live caught up with Leanpath’s own Tom Mansel after we were awarded the group’s Sustainability Initiative of the Year Award.

A recently released, UN-backed study discovered a 7:1 ROI for food waste initiatives in restaurants and shatters the notion that the associated costs of food loss and waste can remain buried in operational budgets, accepted as the cost of doing business, or considered not worth the investment needed to achieve reductions.

In my years coaching chefs on how to prevent food waste, again and again I see three food items being wasted when they should have been repurposed.

A lot of chefs just aren’t sure what to do with them.

The big three are vegetable trim (broccoli stems, cauliflower cores, carrot peels, onions skins, etc.), fruits (whole and trim), and starches (rice, beans, potatoes, grains). It’s probably not a coincidence that none of these are high-priced proteins, which can sometimes be the only focus of a kitchen’s food waste prevention effort.

Repurposing is key to cutting the costs, labor, and unnecessary inventory caused by food waste. Here’s how to tackle the big three by putting them to use instead of putting them in the bin.