Food Waste Intelligence

New research on behalf of Champions 12.3 finds there is a compelling business case for hotels to reduce the amount of food they throw away. For every $1 hotels invested in programs to reduce kitchen food waste, on average they saved $7 in operating costs. LeanPath contributed anonymized data on hotel food waste for the study. LeanPath CEO Andrew Shakman and VP of Food Waste Prevention Steve Finn served on the review committee for the report.

The Commission for Environmental Cooperation (CEC) recently released a comprehensive report on the state of food loss and waste in Canada, Mexico and the United States developed through the CEC’s North American Initiative on Food Waste Reduction and Recovery. Characterization and Management of Food Loss and Waste in North America documents adverse socio-economic and environmental impacts of food loss and waste, and actions that the industrial, commercial, institutional, government and nongovernmental sectors can implement to mitigate ...

Leanpath works in a lot of kitchens. Over 2,500 in more than 38 countries. Our food waste tracking and analytics help these teams understand where their food waste is coming from and why it’s happening. Once they understand that, I work with a lot of them to then figure out strategies to start preventing the waste from happening.

Eighty state-level, food-waste related bills were introduced in the United States last year, according to research by Harvard’s Food Law and Policy Clinic. While tracking is spotty prior to 2017, the clinic believes this represents a strong uptick.

We believe in a big-tent philosophy when it comes to dealing with food waste. There’s room for everybody who has a good idea. We are focused on prevention (aka source reduction). That is, preventing food waste from happening to begin with so kitchens avoid the financial cost of buying food they’ll just throw away, and in turn avoid contributing to the environmental impact of wasted food (CO2 emissions, wasted water, poor land use, etc).