Food Waste Intelligence

Hotel and cruise ship guests--like the majority of all consumers--expect brands to practice sustainability. When those sustainability practices include food waste prevention, it opens the opportunity to discuss the issue with guests, to get them involved in the effort and to bring well-deserved attention to your brand's good work. Talking about food waste can be the new talking-about-towel-reuse initiative! 

To help guide efforts, the World Wildlife Fund (WWF) recently published 5 tips for talking about food waste in its Toolkit For Communicating Food Waste To Guests.

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 part of its global rollout of food waste prevention technology, Sodexo has introduced Leanpath at seven locations in Thailand, including leading hospitals and international schools. 

WasteWatch Powered by Leanpath, Sodexo’s internal food waste prevention program that leverages Leanpath technology and support, has reduced waste at active sites by an average of 50 percent and has been rolled out at 1,200 sites globally. Sodexo’s global goal is to reduce its cumulative food waste 50 percent by 2025.

In its 2020 Environmental Report, released March 2, Google announced its food waste prevention success: 9.2 million pounds prevented since 2014, through its work with Leanpath in hundreds of Google Cafes around the world.

“We constantly devise inventive solutions to repurpose food and to compost and donate leftovers wherever we’re legally able to do so,” the report states. “However, we’ve learned that the best way to reduce food waste is to prevent it in the first place by tracking data and making adjustments.”

Throughout 2020, headlines reminded us of the disruptions the pandemic was having on the global food system. The images of food waste accumulating on farms and milk being dumped because distribution networks were shut down were stark reminders of how fragile the food system is. Put against the increased number of people going hungry as economies faltered, the public was left with a clear message: something has to be done about food waste.

With that clarity, it is no surprise the issue of food waste topped annual trend forecasting reports for consumers, the foodservice industry and legislators.