Food Waste Intelligence

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).

Food Matters Live caught up with Leanpath’s own Tom Mansel after we were awarded the group’s Sustainability Initiative of the Year Award.

A recently released, UN-backed study discovered a 7:1 ROI for restaurant food waste initiatives and shatters the notion that the associated costs of food loss and waste can remain buried in operational budgets, accepted as the cost of doing business, or considered not worth the investment needed to achieve reductions.