Food Waste Intelligence | Leanpath Blog

Reflecting on 15 years of fighting food waste

Written by Andrew Shakman, Co-Founder & CEO | April 24, 2019

 

We’re very excited to celebrate Leanpath’s 15th birthday in 2019. While much has changed since 2004, we’ve remained dedicated to a single challenge: preventing food waste. And as we recently announced, we're currently preventing food waste at a rate of 1 pound every 2 seconds.

When we began, food waste was not a topic of international discussion. Most people understood it was “wrong to waste food,” but this translated into little coordinated action. We spotted the massive economic loss and imagined proven methods from manufacturing (i.e. data-driven discovery) might work in kitchens. We quickly discovered that, yes, daily measurement of food waste did dramatically reduce it. Our technology could transform foodservice and hospitality operations and save them money. But that was only step one.  

As we studied the issue, we also learned about the environmental and social consequences of food waste. Food waste lived at a powerful nexus: by preventing it, we could contribute to solving climate change, lessening food insecurity, conserving precious resources and limiting pollution. Today, everything we do at Leanpath is to ensure a sustainable future by eliminating global food waste.

We also learned that you cannot fix food waste without motivating people to change behavior.  Fortunately, front-line foodservice teams were ready for this challenge: many didn’t waste food at home and didn’t like what happened at work. These individuals were ready to become global change-makers -- they just needed the right tools. 

Fast forward to 2019. The world now cares deeply about food waste. But there’s still so much to do. At Leanpath, we’re tremendously grateful for the opportunity to help this generation of food waste fighters, working in partnership with leading foodservice and hospitality organizations such as Aramark, Google, IKEA, Marriott and Sodexo -- in almost 40 countries -- as they pursue food waste at scale.  We’re proud of our contribution to catalyzing this fight and committed to seeing it grow. Our mission is to make food waste prevention and measurement become everyday practice in the world’s kitchens and we won’t rest until we do!

With sincere appreciation to our many partners and fellow waste warriors,

Andrew Shakman
Co-Founder, CEO