When Google set out in 2022 to cut food waste per Googler in half by 2025, the ambition was deliberately bold. Feeding tens of thousands of employees across hundreds of cafes around the world is no small feat — and doing it with less waste, without compromising the quality that Google's food program is known for, required more than good intentions. It required data and insights.
This year, Google confirmed it has exceeded that moonshot, reducing food waste per Googler by 56% compared to its 2019 baseline. At the same time, the company maintained a landfill diversion rate of 84% — roughly three times the U.S. national average.
“We are very proud of this achievement, one that could not have been realized without the strong partnership we have with Leanpath,” says Kathy Cacciola, Global Sustainability Lead, Food Program at Google. “The work continues. As I like to say, the hard part is getting everyone, everywhere doing the easy stuff every day–tracking food waste, acting on what’s learned.”
At the center of that achievement: a commitment to measuring waste in order to manage it.
Google's global culinary teams rely on Leanpath to track food waste across their kitchens — logging what's being discarded, in what quantities, and why. That granular, real-time visibility transformed how teams approached production decisions, from how much to cook in a given batch to how to handle produce trim and end-of-service leftovers.
Leanpath's AI-powered machine vision classifies different types of food waste in seconds, removing the friction from logging and making it easy for chefs to capture data consistently. Generative AI then summarizes key findings and surfaces actionable recommendations specific to each kitchen's unique challenges.
Teams didn't just passively review that data — they used the insights to drive behavior change. Culinary teams evaluated pictures of waste data to distinguish between preventable and non-preventable seasonal trim, then used those findings to prompt knife skills retraining where yields were falling short. In India, for example, site teams identified their top three wasted items each week and built production plans around reducing those specific losses.
Waste tracking data in Leanpath Online informed one of Google's most widely deployed tactics: Just-in-Time (JIT) cooking. Rather than preparing full volumes of food at the start of service, teams used waste and transaction data to cook in smaller, more frequent batches calibrated to actual demand. This approach showed up across regions:
• In Austin, Texas, The Eddy cafe leaned heavily into rigorous transaction tracking and JIT batch cooking, cutting overproduction.
• In the San Francisco Bay Area, culinary teams launched Friday Brunch, a rotating menu paying culinary tribute to SF's iconic neighborhoods. This initiative inspired culinary creativity, increasing ingredient repurposing and dropping Friday overproduction.
• Across the APAC and India, a campaign challenged teams to create Zero Waste Dishes, successfully turning common trim waste—like watermelon rinds and pineapple peels—into delicious recipes, broths, and garnishes.
• Across the Zurich campus, teams achieved a reduction in overproduction waste by collaborating across buildings on menu planning, sharing details about specials and peak days, and introducing a repurpose station into every cafe.
Surpassing the moonshot is a milestone, not a finish line. Google's team is clear-eyed about the path forward: adjusting production to variable attendance, adapting to shifts in municipal waste policies, and expanding composting access in parts of the world where infrastructure is limited.
Looking ahead, Google is deepening its use of AI to simplify data input and accelerate analysis in Leanpath, making it even easier for kitchens everywhere to capture waste data and act on it quickly. All sites are expected to continue measuring and tracking food waste in Leanpath while working toward internal per-person targets.