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).

Hard to believe that it has been a year since I hung up my toque and became the World’s First Food Waste Fighting Chef here at LeanPath. Over the past year, it has been a deep dive into learning all I can about the global scale of food waste. The problem is big--really big--and we need to teach, train, inspire and help all those out there on the front line every day to do their part to combat this global crisis. It’s interesting: the more I teach, the more I learn. Most of my learning has come from talking with the chefs that utilize ...