Food Waste Intelligence

In the United States, 30 to 40 percent of all available food is wasted. Food is the nation’s single largest type of waste. Three U.S. federal agencies have announced a coordinated strategy to address the crisis.

Words matter, and just as it’s important to distinguish between terms such as food loss, food waste, and excess food, it’s also important to distinguish between “recovery” and “prevention” -- because the initiatives and impacts are very different.

There are so many moving parts in hospital foodservice that chefs and managers rarely have time to identify the root causes of food waste, let alone strategize to improve their operations. That's why Palomar Health trusts Leanpath technology to measure their food waste, analyze food waste data, and provide reporting and expert coaching to guide their prevention efforts.

When food is delivered to a kitchen’s backdoor, it has one cost: the food cost. Once it enters the kitchen, it starts getting saddled with labor costs. Unloading, storing, prepping, cooking, plating, serving, disposing. It’s a basic model that every chef and manager understands, but it’s important to keep it in mind when we talk about the impact food waste prevention has on labor.

The easiest way to understand one part of the cost of doing nothing about your food waste problem is to use our Savings Opportunity Calculator. This will tell you, based on the size of your operation, how much you stand to save by preventing food waste with Leanpath. What you stand to save is another way of understanding what it’s costing you to ignore food waste. But there’s another cost that is less precise but perhaps even more critical: every day you do nothing about food waste, you are sacrificing your competitive advantage.