Food Waste Intelligence

An ambitious new resource to help understand the problem of food waste in the United States ranked food waste tracking as the most financially impactful solution foodservice organizations can leverage. Launched by the nonprofit ReFED, the new Insights Engine builds on the group’s landmark 2016 study, A Roadmap to Reduce U.S. Food Waste by 20%. Like in that earlier report, preventing food waste (which food waste tracking enables) remains the focus of the Insights Engine.

Peels, pulp, cores, rinds, stems. When you prep fruits and vegetables you end up with trim. And for the majority of kitchens using Leanpath, trim waste ranks as their second biggest source of waste (behind overproduction). But that trim doesn’t have to lead to trim waste. You can maximize usage of this product, making better use of your food spend along the way. Remember, you paid for that rind, so why just throw it out? Here are 18 ideas to get better use out of that often overlooked and underutilized fruit and vegetable trim.

Mount Holyoke College started tracking food waste with Leanpath in October of 2019. And then, well, the world changed. For the safety of the community the majority of the students were asked to leave in the spring. The college reopened in August with only 150 students on campus. The private women’s college in Massachusetts, USA, typically has a student body of 2,200. “But the college wanted to make sure those students got a great dining program, and they also wanted to keep as many of our foodservice staff employed as possible,” expla...

Despite the many challenges the foodservice industry faced in 2020, kitchens around the world working with Leanpath still prevented 12 million pounds (or 5 million kilos) of food from being wasted last year. A significant bright spot in an otherwise dark year. This takes Leanpath’s total for the past 6 years alone to 61 million pounds (28 million kilos) of food waste prevented. As we often say, food waste is a nexus issue: when you prevent food waste from happening you also address some of the most pressing environmental problems we f...

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 ...