Food Waste Intelligence

The easiest way to understand one part of the cost of doing nothing about your food waste problem is to use our Savings Opportunity Calculator. This will tell you, based on the size of your operation, how much you stand to save by preventing food waste with Leanpath. What you stand to save is another way of understanding what it’s costing you to ignore food waste.

But there’s another cost that is less precise but perhaps even more critical: every day you do nothing about food waste, you are sacrificing your competitive advantage.

Novotel Brisbane is a 296-room hotel located in the city’s business district. Executive Chef Sean Collins has focused his food waste tracking at the breakfast buffet, which serves 150-400 guests daily. The savings he's realized have been reinvested in the kitchen, leading to better product and steady menu pricing. “The whole exercise has bolstered our competitive edge. Not having to increase our prices to compensate for cost of goods: that’s given us a head start above our competitors.”

Collins has lead his team to a 66 percent reduction in waste value and 62 percent cut in waste weight.

IKEA Lyssach, in northern Switzerland, serves 6,000 to 8,000 meals in a six-day work week. For the past year, it has been tracking food waste with LeanPath at its restaurant, co-worker restaurant, bistro and Swedish Food Market. The food waste data has driven targeted prevention strategies that brought a 50% reduction in food waste cost and a 45% reduction food waste weight in one year.

Everybody talks about a “global food system,” but one of the biggest problems with that system is that it has never been managed as a system. We measure the success of a crop based on production per acre and we measure the cost of a tomato based on the price we pay at the grocery store. But what about all the other costs wrapped up in agriculture: the impact on biodiversity, the negative results of pesticide use, the treatment of workers, the impact of food waste.

New research on behalf of the U.N.’s Champions 12.3 finds there is a strong business case for foodservice operators serving hospitals, schools, sports arenas and other facilities to reduce food waste. The Business Case for Reducing Food Loss and Waste: Catering shows that for every $1 caterers invested in programs to curb food waste, they saved more than $6 in operating costs. (“Catering” here refers to “contract catering” or “foodservice contract management.”)