Food Waste Intelligence

As soon as the COVID-19 pandemic reached the U.S., Vidant Medical Center in eastern North Carolina began to prepare for the potential of overcrowding, supply chain interruptions, and overwhelming strain on the staff. To support the patients and staff, Vidant’s dining services team jumped in to adapt their operations.

“Our customer base dropped dramatically almost overnight,” said Troy Sheppard, Food & Nutrition Service Line Administrator and Client Executive with Sodexo, which provides dining operations for Vidant Health system. Increased staffing demands created further challenges, as self-serve food lines were converted to staffed stations and heightened sanitation protocols required more labor time. A shifted focus on quick service dining changed the norm even further.

Changing operations and supporting the staff in a pandemic didn’t mean the Sodexo team would abandon their sustainability commitments. On the contrary, Sodexo has continued rolling out its food waste prevention platform, WasteWatch powered by Leanpath (WWxLP), globally, despite the pandemic. WWxLP has deployed at 732 Sodexo sites, including 188 healthcare sites in the US, nearly all since the onset of COVID-19. More than 1,200 Sodexo kitchens globally are currently in the program.

An ambitious new resource to help understand the problem of food waste in the United States ranked food waste tracking as the most financially impactful solution foodservice organizations can leverage.

Launched by the nonprofit ReFED, the new Insights Engine builds on the group’s landmark 2016 study, A Roadmap to Reduce U.S. Food Waste by 20%. Like in that earlier report, preventing food waste (which food waste tracking enables) remains the focus of the Insights Engine.

Mount Holyoke College started tracking food waste with Leanpath in October of 2019. And then, well, the world changed.

For the safety of the community the majority of the students were asked to leave in the spring. The college reopened in August with only 150 students on campus. The private women’s college in Massachusetts, USA, typically has a student body of 2,200.

“But the college wanted to make sure those students got a great dining program, and they also wanted to keep as many of our foodservice staff employed as possible,” explains Dining Services Manager Shawn Kelsey. “We opened half of our food stations and made sure we had a lot of offerings. The students got a great experience, but we knew food waste and diversion was going to be an immense challenge.”

The kitchen utilized the Leanpath tracking system to its full potential by reviewing food waste reports, sharing that data with the staff and quickly incorporating innovative ideas to prevent the waste going forward.

Despite the many challenges the foodservice industry faced in 2020, kitchens around the world working with Leanpath still prevented 12 million pounds (or 5 million kilos) of food from being wasted last year. A significant bright spot in an otherwise dark year. This takes Leanpath’s total for the past 6 years alone to 61 million pounds (28 million kilos) of food waste prevented.

As we often say, food waste is a nexus issue: when you prevent food waste from happening you also address some of the most pressing environmental problems we face. With the prevention of 61 million pounds of food waste, Leanpath clients also prevented over 24 billion gallons of water from being wasted, 194 thousand metric tonnes of CO2 emissions, and kept 51 million meals in the food system.

As we all adjusted to the challenges of 2020, 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 in the learning and adapting process kitchens went through as they rose to the challenge of the new normal. What a kitchen wasted was one of the few real-time data points it could use to understand what was working and what was not as volumes dropped and service styles changed dramatically. 

Controlling food waste became more important than ever. And the need for food waste intelligence was as important as always. Here are the 5 blog posts our audience found most valuable in a year full of surprises.