Food Waste Intelligence

Pop quiz: you run a busy hospital kitchen, and one of your food suppliers calls you up to ask why your spend with them has decreased since last year. What do you tell them?

If you’re Nuno Matias, Head of Catering at NHS Royal Brompton Hospital, you tell them you’re spending less because you’re not throwing as much of their product away - as a result of managing your food waste with Leanpath.

Nuno and his team have fully embraced Leanpath across their whole catering operation, and their results have been excellent. Cost pressure on NHS spending continues to grow, and the new National Standards for healthcare food and drink are driving increased focus on food efficiency. Nuno addresses these issues by using Leanpath to track and reduce food waste on the hospital’s wards, in his production kitchen and his staff and visitor restaurant.

I caught up with him to understand how he gets the best out of Leanpath.

Three United States federal agencies have released the National Strategy for Reducing Food Loss and Waste and Recycling Organics. In line with the recently released U.S. Environmental Protection Agency Wasted Food Scale, the strategy prioritizes food waste prevention–stopping food waste from being created to begin with–which is the solution Leanpath provides to the foodservice industry.

This is the first interagency national strategy that lays out a path for the United States to meet its national goal to halve food loss and waste by 2030.To help advance progress toward this goal, the Biden-Harris Administration has invested more than $200 million to reduce food loss and waste.

Leanpath CEO and founder Andrew Shakman recently hosted a webinar on the future of food waste prevention and how operators must adapt to that changing landscape.

“When we look to the future,” says Shakman, “we think that food waste action is going to be more required by law and integrated into everyday practice in the world's kitchens rather than being a special activity in an innovation context. It’s going to be the norm of how we think and work.”

Here are 5 ways foodservice operations must adapt:

Uniworld Boutique River Cruises rolled out Leanpath across its full fleet of 11 ships in 2023 and has already seen a 36 percent reduction in food waste.

But the cruise line is finding even more value in its food waste measurement and prevention by showcasing their work with Leanpath to guests in a special “Progressive Dinner” series (pictured).

Here’s how Uniworld explains it in their recently released 2023 Impact Report:

This week, Leanpath is excited to be in Baltimore alongside many of our food waste reduction-focused colleagues from around the world at the 2024 ReFED Food Waste Solutions Summit.

As we have been preparing for the multitude of sessions at this year’s event, we’ve also been reflecting on the state and pace of food waste reduction efforts in the U.S. and in countries across the globe.