Food Waste Intelligence

Pop quiz: you run a busy hospital kitchen, and one of your food suppliers calls you up to ask why your spend with them has decreased since last year. What do you tell them?

If you’re Nuno Matias, Head of Catering at NHS Royal Brompton Hospital, you tell them you’re spending less because you’re not throwing as much of their product away - as a result of managing your food waste with Leanpath.

Nuno and his team have fully embraced Leanpath across their whole catering operation, and their results have been excellent. Cost pressure on NHS spending continues to grow, and the new National Standards for healthcare food and drink are driving increased focus on food efficiency. Nuno addresses these issues by using Leanpath to track and reduce food waste on the hospital’s wards, in his production kitchen and his staff and visitor restaurant.

I caught up with him to understand how he gets the best out of Leanpath.

The catering team at Guy’s and St. Thomas’ NHS Foundation Trust are working with Leanpath to prevent food waste throughout their foodservice operation. In their central production unit (CPU) alone, in only eight months, they have cut their food waste by 42 percent, preventing over 3.5 tonnes of food from going to waste.

How do you provide great hospitality in some of the most inhospitable places on earth, without food waste costing the earth financially and environmentally? I asked Winston Hugh, Compass Group Australia’s National Food Waste Reduction Manager (what a great job title!).

An Exec Chef by background, Winston knows his apples when it comes to commercial kitchen operations. He’s also Canadian, so he’s no stranger to wide open spaces. Compass Group Australia’s Leanpath programme is overseen by him, and I was curious to find out what it’s really like to fight food waste in their Defence, Offshore and Remote (DOR) sites, which are often hundreds of miles from the nearest town. Think huge mining sites at the end of a long and dusty supply line with buffets for thousands of hungry miners, or barracks feeding servicemen and women on a large scale. Places where, to mis-quote AC/DC’s Angus Young, “It’s a Long Way to the Shop if you Wanna Sausage Roll.”