Food Waste Intelligence

Pop quiz: you run a busy hospital kitchen, and one of your food suppliers calls you up to ask why your spend with them has decreased since last year. What do you tell them?

If you’re Nuno Matias, Head of Catering at NHS Royal Brompton Hospital, you tell them you’re spending less because you’re not throwing as much of their product away - as a result of managing your food waste with Leanpath.

Nuno and his team have fully embraced Leanpath across their whole catering operation, and their results have been excellent. Cost pressure on NHS spending continues to grow, and the new National Standards for healthcare food and drink are driving increased focus on food efficiency. Nuno addresses these issues by using Leanpath to track and reduce food waste on the hospital’s wards, in his production kitchen and his staff and visitor restaurant.

I caught up with him to understand how he gets the best out of Leanpath.

Uniworld Boutique River Cruises rolled out Leanpath across its full fleet of 11 ships in 2023 and has already seen a 36 percent reduction in food waste.

But the cruise line is finding even more value in its food waste measurement and prevention by showcasing their work with Leanpath to guests in a special “Progressive Dinner” series (pictured).

Here’s how Uniworld explains it in their recently released 2023 Impact Report:

East Carolina University Medical Center’s Beaufort Hospital is a 142-bed healthcare campus in Washington, North Carolina, USA. Food and nutrition services are operated by Sodexo and overseen by General Manager Denise M. Hewitt and Executive Chef John Jacob Phillips (above at his Leanpath Tracker). 

The team has successfully reduced its kitchen waste by 53 percent since implementing the  Leanpath program in 2020. Expanding on that success, beginning in 2023, they started using their program to track plate waste from patient trays, and within months they have seen a reduction in plate waste of 24 percent.

In 2018, Sodexo announced the largest deployment of automated food waste prevention technology in the world, with the plan to roll out WasteWatch powered by Leanpath at 3,000 of its sites worldwide, with the goal of cutting its food waste in half by 2025.

To achieve this level of impact requires strong leadership at a regional level. 

To learn more about what it takes to drive regional commitment and results, we spoke with Sodexo’s Regional Project Manager and Leanpath Champion for the Middle East and Africa, Umesh Jaiswar. Umesh oversees the rollout and success of WasteWatch Powered by Leanpath in the region. WWxLP, as it’s known, is the Sodexo-branded food waste prevention program using Leanpath technology.

In our recent Leanpath/US Foods webinar, How Metz Culinary Prevents Food Waste, chefs Timothy Morris and Zach Walrath talked through their strategies for reducing plate waste.

Check out the webinar excerpt above to learn their tactics for educating diners and managing portion control --while still delighting customers--to drop plate waste by 25-30%.

Watch the full webinar here to learn more tips and strategies.