Food Waste Intelligence

As the situation around COVID-19 continues to evolve, many foodservice operations around the globe are experiencing impacts. With a focus on health and safety, operations are temporarily closing, adjusting hours to limited service, or changing service styles to remove self-service or buffets - anything to mitigate the chance of spreading the virus. Foodservice teams may be notified with short notice of these changes in an effort to further protect our communities.

Salad bars are vital in high-volume operations. The salad bar concept allows the kitchen to feed a lot of guests with the least amount of labor cost. It gives guests the ability to customize their meals. It offers chefs a way to utilize and repurpose ingredients in a creative and efficient manner. There are many positives to salad bars, but standard displays and operating procedures can also lead to massive amounts of food waste.

The holidays can be tough on the planet. Road trips and flights to visit family. Christmas gifts shrouded in plastic. A lot of consumption and waste. As culinary professionals our focus this time of year is on guests and food. We are in the unique position on the front line to make the changes to combat the global food waste problem and be part of the solution. A lot of food gets wasted this time of year, so what can you do about it?

As Leanpath's full time Executive Chef, I've trained and coached hundreds of chefs and managers on preventing food waste in their operations. When you spend this much time with frontline foodservice workers, hearing their food waste successes and horror stories, valuable trends emerge. One of the most aggravating food loss reasons I hear about all the time is equipment failure. As chefs and managers, we trust our kitchen tools, sometimes too much. Here are a few questions to ask your staff to prevent food waste due to equipment failur...

When food is delivered to a kitchen’s backdoor, it has one cost: the food cost. Once it enters the kitchen, it starts getting saddled with labor costs. Unloading, storing, prepping, cooking, plating, serving, disposing. It’s a basic model that every chef and manager understands, but it’s important to keep it in mind when we talk about the impact food waste prevention has on labor.