How Sodexo North America Cut Food Waste in Half Across Hundreds of Kitchens: Webinar Takeaways
Posted By Leanpath on Sep 8, 2026
Ask any of the NGOs or research organizations focused on the global food waste crisis how we get this problem under control, and they'll tell you the same thing: big organizations need to set big food waste reduction goals.
That's exactly what Sodexo North America did. The region set a 50% food waste reduction target, and crushed it.
In a recent Leanpath webinar, we sat down with Jessica Synkoski, VP of Sustainability and CSR at Sodexo North America; Andrew Shakman, Leanpath CEO; and Jude Maderos, Leanpath senior program manager who previously spent nearly a decade at Sodexo working on the food waste reduction program. The conversation covered how one of the world's largest food service organizations achieved its goal and what other organizations can learn from the journey.
Here are the key takeaways.
Sustainability wasn't bolted on—it was in the DNA
Sodexo is a global foodservice and facilities management company operating "anywhere people work, heal, learn, or play": office cafeterias, university campuses, convention centers, healthcare facilities, and more. North America is the company's largest region, with a workforce of nearly 100,000 employees spread across client sites throughout the US and Canada.
Synkoski emphasized that food waste reduction wasn't a trend Sodexo chased. The company was one of the first to build positive environmental and social impact into its mission statement, dating back to founder Pierre Bellon. That top-down cultural commitment shaped everything that followed.
But mission alone isn't the whole story. Food waste is material to Sodexo's business: it affects service quality, and it represents a significant cost-saving opportunity for the company and its clients. When sustainability, service quality, and financial stewardship all point in the same direction, a program gains real staying power.
From paper and pencil to a technology-powered platform
Sodexo has been working on food waste since the early 2000s through its Waste Watch program, originally a manual, site-by-site tracking process. As Shakman noted, writing waste down on paper is better than not measuring at all, but it isn't sustainable at scale.
Leanpath's relationship with Sodexo began almost 18 years ago with a deployment at a US military base, followed by years of pilots across universities, corporate facilities, and other segments. The lesson from those pilots: innovative programs don't automatically scale across hundreds or thousands of sites. Scale requires technology that makes the work easier for frontline teams, not harder.
Those two threads converged when Sodexo leadership decided WasteWatch was the right platform and Leanpath was the technology to power it. WasteWatch powered by Leanpath launched in the US and quickly became a catalyst for global change, spreading to Sodexo operations in the UK, Singapore, and beyond, ultimately becoming a top-level group priority.
"It would not have spread if the technology were clunky," Synkoski said. Ease of use for frontline teams was critical to adoption.
Set a public goal, then put real money behind it
Sodexo made a commitment to reduce its food waste 50% and they made it public. Broadcasting the goal created what Synkoski called a galvanizing "North Star" for the business, even though, at the time, the organization didn't yet know exactly how it would get there.
What set Sodexo apart was how deeply the goal was wired into the business:
Leadership compensation was tied to it. Annual and long-term incentive pay for leaders was connected to hitting milestones toward the target.
Corporate financing was tied to it. At the group level, Sodexo connected a line of credit—representing over a billion dollars in volume—to its food waste reduction performance, with the interest rate linked to progress against the WasteWatch target. Shakman called it the first arrangement of its kind he'd ever seen.
The result: food waste reduction became everyone's business, not just the sustainability team's. Synkoski shared a telling detail: the monthly email updating leadership on progress toward the target comes from the finance team, not from her department. "I don't have to spend any time trying to convince people that this is an important thing to focus on," she said.
Measurement is the first act of prevention
Sodexo's approach follows the Champions 12.3 framework of Target, Measure, Act: set a reduction target, measure your food waste, then act on the data.
Why is measurement so central? As Shakman explained, measurement isn't just data collection, it's the first act of preventing wasted food. Measurement makes waste visible, reveals root causes, and makes progress trackable. Without a baseline, you can't know whether things are getting better or worse.
It also changes how teams see the contents of a waste bin. "Everything in the bin represents an idea for improvement," Shakman said, a chance to change production, purchasing, or a menu so the waste doesn't recur.
And the act of measuring itself changes behavior. When kitchen teams start weighing waste, eyes open. People discover waste that was happening right in front of them, including waste they'd mentally redefined as "not waste," like overproducing so a display looks bountiful. That awareness kicks off behavioral feedback loops before any formal intervention: cooks core tomatoes more carefully, think twice before firing another pan.
Engagement made it stick: Not On My Watch, Goalympics, and Wasteless Week
Sodexo wrapped the program in employee engagement to make it durable, with a heavy focus on frontline teams, the people Shakman called "the heroes" of the effort.
Not On My Watch. Developed to change kitchen culture, this program educated frontline employees on why they were being asked to do something new. It included talking points for managers, bite-sized huddle cards for pre-shift meetings (including questions like "What are you throwing away at home?" to connect kitchen behavior to daily life), and posters tracking each site's progress toward the 50% goal. Managers and chefs were grateful to have resources for a conversation that was new to many of them.
Goalympics. A voluntary, friendly competition between sites—chefs in California competing with chefs in Texas, for instance—built around waste-reduction activities and use of the Leanpath system. Games could be targeted at specific problems showing up in the data, like overproduction of vegetables. Winners earn Olympic-style medals in virtual closing ceremonies attended by their bosses and teammates. The program, designed by Maderos, started in North America and has since been emulated by Sodexo regions around the world. Critically, Goalympics runs on the goals function within Leanpath, reinforcing a core principle: break the big problem into small, specific, actionable goals—cut wasted oatmeal 50% in 10 days for instance—and work them one at a time.
Wasteless Week. Held every October, this awareness week broadens the lens beyond food waste to other kitchen and front-of-house waste, and deliberately brings clients and guests into the effort, important, since plate waste carries a major environmental impact of its own.
Peer-to-peer learning. Sodexo also partnered with Leanpath on in-kitchen training led by Leanpath chefs who worked directly with site teams. Chef-to-chef conversation proved far more powerful than top-down presentations. As Synkoski joked, "We're not reaching people with a PowerPoint." The company's Better Tomorrow Community of Practice meets monthly so operators can share wins, questions, and solutions with peers.
A unifying idea ran through all of it: normalize the conversation. If food waste is scary or shameful to admit, people won't talk about it and it stays the elephant in the kitchen. Sodexo made it safe to acknowledge waste, because acknowledging it is the first step to fixing it.
Structure and coordination kept hundreds of kitchens on track
With a program this size, there's a fourth element beyond target, measure, act: coordination.
Standardization was essential. Because financial incentives were tied to the target, Sodexo needed rigorous, unified measurement methodology, not self-reported, pencil-and-paper data varying site by site. A single platform meant the data could be trusted and rolled up like financial data, and finance-team scrutiny raised the bar on data quality.
Champions—and co-champions—created resilience. Each site designated a champion, typically a chef or production manager, to drive the program locally. But champions sometimes leave, and in a high-turnover industry, a departure could quietly stall a site's progress. The fix: recruit a co-champion at every site, creating a layer of support that survives staffing changes.
Ongoing partnership kept everyone aligned. Segment leaders and Leanpath still hold monthly calls to review data and find solutions, ensuring the right people have access to the right reports at every level, from senior leadership to the associate weighing waste in the pot room.
Constant training and refresh countered turnover. Onboarding builds the waste-reduction culture into every new hire's experience, and annual programs like Goalympics and Wasteless Week are tweaked each year to give teams something new to look forward to.
One more benefit worth noting: engagement pays dividends beyond waste. Maderos described operations that embed employee names into their Leanpath trackers, so a chef can spot that Mary is weighing carrots every day and invite her into the solution. When frontline employees feel part of something bigger, she noted, it helps retention too.
What's next: maintaining the goal and bringing in AI
Reaching 50% isn't the finish line. Sodexo has already set new targets to maintain the reduction—because food comes into the kitchen every day, and attention can't lapse—alongside targets to deepen utilization of Leanpath tools and the WasteWatch program.
Looking ahead, both organizations see AI as the next frontier. Leanpath's platform is now heavily AI-driven, using computer vision to identify foods and make tracking a touchless process, automating data summarization, and prompting teams on what to do next. Sodexo, meanwhile, is increasingly integrating waste data into core menu management and inventory systems, a level of integration that opens new avenues for prevention.
