Food Waste Intelligence

In 2019, building on several years of work in providing donations to various non-profit organizations in the food sector, we were excited to formalize and amplify those efforts with the creation of a new and separate structure at Leanpath, the Leanpath 12.3 Initiative.

With a name that draws a parallel to Target 12.3 – the UN’s Sustainable Development Goal that calls for cutting global food loss and waste in half by 2030 – we created the Leanpath 12.3 Initiative with a specific purpose:  to assist mission-aligned, resource-constrained nonprofits and educational institutions in advancing their work on food waste prevention.

As we all adjusted to the challenges of 2020, something notable rose to the surface in foodservice: measuring food waste was no longer just a way to cut costs and be more efficient, it became a key tool in the learning and adapting process kitchens went through as they rose to the challenge of the new normal. What a kitchen wasted was one of the few real-time data points it could use to understand what was working and what was not as volumes dropped and service styles changed dramatically. 

Controlling food waste became more important than ever. And the need for food waste intelligence was as important as always. Here are the 5 blog posts our audience found most valuable in a year full of surprises.

UK-based WRAP, the Waste Resources Action Programme, recently announced a food waste reduction campaign entitled “Wasting food: it’s out of date.” This is a highly visual effort to convey the scale of the food waste challenge through eye-opening facts (ex. the UK discards 20 million slices of bread daily) and the associated deep environmental, social, and financial impacts (ex. over 500,000 acres of land are unnecessarily used to produce the inputs for that wasted bread).

Building on WRAP’s Love Food, Hate Waste work, the idea is to further educate UK citizens on the severity of the food waste challenge and catalyze change at the consumer level, where 70% of the UK’s food waste occurs.

According to a new report, the energy, transportation and manufacturing sectors could drastically reduce their carbon emissions, but the world still wouldn’t hit Paris climate agreement targets because of greenhouse gases from the food system. A staggering reminder of the need to prevent food waste, among other food system improvements.

Waste 360's Nothing Wasted Podcast sat down with Leanpath Co-Founder and CEO Andrew Shakman to discuss food waste as a "nexus issue": the fact that when you prevent food waste, you also prevent other bad things from happening. Food waste prevention reduces greenhouse gas emissions, it stops fresh water from being squandered growing food that only gets wasted, and it leaves valuable resources in the food system for those who are food insecure. It's a big deal. Hear Andrew elaborate on this and other topics. Go straight to the podcast here.