Food Waste Intelligence

The world is experiencing a massive labor shortage, the impact of which is falling particularly hard on foodservice. Chefs and managers are being forced to introduce new processes and procedures that allow the day-to-day functions of the kitchen to continue, but with much less labor than they had before. When chefs and managers choose a labor-saving tactic to fix one aspect of the operation, there may be pitfalls or unintended consequences, like an increase in food waste.

UVA Dine, operated by Aramark, has been tracking food waste with Leanpath since 2018. The team has racked up impressive results using the program, including reducing their food waste by 59%. They have achieved these results by using tracking data to identify food waste instances and trends and addressing them with their kitchen teams.

#1: How Mount Holyoke College used food waste tracking to quickly adapt to COVID-19 changes

As we all adjusted to the challenges of COVID-19, something notable rose to the surface in foodservice: measuring food waste was no longer just a way to cut costs and be more efficient, it became a key tool for learning and adapting to the new normal. What a kitchen wastes is one of the few real-time data points it can use to understand what's working and what's not.

Our top blog post of the year took a deep dive into how Mount Holyoke, a women's college in Massachusetts, USA, leveraged food waste tracking to its fullest.

The challenges faced by the foodservice industry in 2021–rising food and labor costs and disrupted supply chains–put a fine point on the need to prevent food waste and its financial burden. The growing body of evidence connecting food waste and climate change created even more urgency for foodservice organizations.

Working with those organizations in over 40 countries, Leanpath and its partners prevented 14 million pounds of food from going to waste, bringing the total impact since 2004–when Leanpath introduced food waste prevention solutions–to 90 million pounds. 

That equates to 75 million meals kept in the food system for those who need them. And over 284 thousand metric tons of CO² kept out of our skies.

Here are a few other highlights from the year:

It’s clear that an organization is doing pioneering work in the food system when the President and the Vice President come to participate, as occurred at DC Central Kitchen (DCCK) just before Thanksgiving.

And we agree.

Leanpath has been proud to partner with DCCK for the past three years through our Leanpath 12.3 initiative, supporting the organization’s transformative work to address hunger and poverty through job training and job creation since its founding by Robert Egger over 30 years ago (read more about DCCK’s history here). 

We’re united by powerful, complementary, and systemic change-focused missions around food.