Food Waste Intelligence

It’s clear that an organization is doing pioneering work in the food system when the President and the Vice President come to participate, as occurred at DC Central Kitchen (DCCK) just before Thanksgiving. And we agree. Leanpath has been proud to partner with DCCK for the past three years through our Leanpath 12.3 initiative, supporting the organization’s transformative work to address hunger and poverty through job training and job creation since its founding by Robert Egger over 30 years ago (read more about DCCK’s history here). We...

Aramark Regional Executive Chef Damon Mangano oversees the food and nutrition services at a large Midwestern healthcare system running 11 hospitals. Tracking and preventing food waste with Leanpath since 2017, the system’s kitchens have reduced their cumulative waste 50%. Chef Damon says from the start, his chefs were startled by the cost of the food they were wasting, which teams see in the Leanpath system as soon as items are tracked. “From the very start, when cooks saw what the food waste was costing, folk were saying things like,...

Food waste is a $1 trillion global problem. And roughly one quarter of that waste is coming from foodservice--a significant source of lost profits for the industry. The cost of food waste is typically equated with the purchase cost of that wasted food, which makes sense. But the true cost of food waste has to also factor in the cost of the labor used in inventorying, preparing, serving and ultimately discarding that food waste. Right now, the world is experiencing a massive labor shortage, the impact of which is falling particularly h...

It’s been an exciting, and pivotal, couple of weeks as world leaders, policymakers, business leaders, and concerned citizens gathered in Glasgow for COP26 – the Conference of the Parties to focus global efforts on emissions reduction. And while we prepare to analyze the final outcomes of the sessions, the need to sharply reduce emissions across all meaningful contributing sectors is beyond question.

The U.S.-based National Association of College and University Food Service (NACUFS) put food waste as the top sustainability priority among a list of 10 pressing issues in their newly released Sustainability Guide. Recognizing the broad impact of addressing food waste, the guide states, “When the reduction of food waste occurs, climate change, water scarcity, and hunger are impacted, in addition to operational savings.”