Food Waste Intelligence

There’s a lot of attention on carbon reduction these days, and that’s a good thing.

Because the need to reduce carbon emissions to limit global warming is clear and urgent, and like food waste reduction, is critically linked to all of the other Sustainable Development Goals.

The Paris Agreement of 2015 sought to galvanize a global response to climate change with a goal of limiting global temperature rise to less than 2°C (and preferably less than 1.5°C) over pre-industrial levels by the end of this century.

Leanpath CEO Andrew Shakman recently joined three other leaders of the global food waste movement – Tristram Stuart, UK-based activist, author and Feedback founder, Dana Gunders, Executive Director at ReFED and author of the key U.S.-focused report Wasted: How America is Losing Up to 40 Percent of Its Food From Farm to Fork to Landfill, and culinary expert Jonathan Deutsch, Drexel University Professor and Director of the Drexel Food Lab and President of the Upcycled Food Foundation – in a special educational session on accelerating food waste reduction organized by faculty at Boston University’s Gastronomy and Food Studies program.

At Leanpath, our focus is on helping large foodservice kitchens track and prevent their food waste by 50% or more. But food waste, of course, doesn’t just happen in foodservice kitchens. In fact, according to a recent report by the UN Environment Programme, the bulk of the world’s food waste comes from home kitchens: ⅓ of the 1.3 billion tonnes wasted each year globally (foodservice kitchens account for ¼ of the total).

As Leanpath's full time Executive Chef, I've trained and coached hundreds of chefs and managers on preventing food waste in their operations. One of the most persistent issues is also one of the most avoidable: food waste from items expiring in storage. Avoiding this waste takes establishing and following strict processes to ensure everything in storage is used before it can expire. Here are three questions to ask yourself or your team to find out how effective your kitchen is at avoiding expired food waste.

Earth Day is April 22. There’s never a wrong time to talk about the impact of food waste prevention on the environment, but Earth Day seems particularly well suited. Each day in the seven days leading up to Earth Day? Even better.

If your organization is committed to food waste prevention, we encourage you to remind your team of the critical work they are doing to address some of the world’s greatest sustainability challenges. Beginning April 15—one week before Earth Day—incorporate one reason why food waste prevention matters a day into communications with your teams, either in emails or directly in morning meetings in the kitchen. 

If you’re not yet working to prevent food waste, share these with corporate decision makers and sustainability teams. And remind them, food waste prevention—actually stopping food waste before it is created—is the only way to impact all these environmental issues, while also having a financial impact on your bottom line. 

Here are 7 mind blowing food waste impact statements that can help shift the hearts and minds of your kitchen teams as you focus on why food waste matters leading up to Earth Day this year: