Food Waste Intelligence

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.

With more than 420 stores in 52 markets worldwide IKEA is now two years into its ambitious program to reduce food waste in all the IKEA stores by 50% before end of August 2020. So far more than 1.4 million kilos of food have been saved since the program started, which is equivalent to more than 3 million meals (one meal equals 450 grams).