Food Waste Intelligence

Leanpath is proud to announce the evolution of food waste prevention technology. Impact Suite is a powerful new set of tools that go beyond tracking food waste to actually guiding kitchens through specific actions to reduce their largest food waste issues.

Swedish is the largest non-profit healthcare provider in the Puget Sound, Washington, area. Six of its dispersed facilities utilize the Leanpath platform to prevent food waste. The healthcare foodservice operation at its First Hill campus is run by Corporate Executive Chef Zachary Schwab. First Hill typically has about 1,800 covers a day in patient services, with 600 meals a day retail and around 10 catered events. Schwab has overseen food waste reduction with Leanpath since 2007. That experience has led to the development of system-wide best practices and deep cuts in food waste: a 53 percent reduction in food waste by value and a 40 percent reduction by weight.

There are three new realities foodservice kitchens will face as they reopen that carry the risk of creating excessive amounts of food waste. In a Leanpath webinar entitled Reopen Strong, Leanpath CEO Andrew Shakman led a discussion with the Leanpath Culinary Council to explain these new realities and how to avoid the food waste lurking within them. Here is a summary of the discussion.

When it comes to greenhouse gas emissions, all food waste is not equal. Based on its GHG footprint, meat waste contributes the largest amount of emissions by weight. Waste a little bit of beef, contribute a lot of GHGs.

But as a recent World Resources Institute report shows, vegetables are actually the biggest contributor to emissions behind beef and seafood, simply because of the sheer volume of vegetables wasted.

It is very hard to read the latest UN report on climate change. Not technically challenging - it’s written in very clear, stark language - but emotionally difficult. The problems are so big, so daunting, it’s hard to keep it all in your head at once. So it’s worth remembering as we are faced again with the enormity of the problem, that the way to deal with any big challenge is to break it down into manageable pieces, and focus on those. For foodservice kitchens, the manageable piece of the climate challenge is preventing food waste.