Food Waste Intelligence

Food waste prevention–the only way to address food waste that delivers triple-bottom-line benefits–requires new kitchen tools and workflows. For busy kitchens with thin margins, this rightly brings up questions – and can lead to misconceptions. One of the biggest myths about food waste prevention is that it takes too long. In fact, food waste tracking and the prevention it enables not only saves money, it saves time, making kitchen teams more efficient. Let’s dig a little deeper into this myth and get a better idea of the actual ROI o...

Mount Holyoke College started tracking food waste with Leanpath in October of 2019. And then, well, the world changed. For the safety of the community the majority of the students were asked to leave in the spring. The college reopened in August with only 150 students on campus. The private women’s college in Massachusetts, USA, typically has a student body of 2,200. “But the college wanted to make sure those students got a great dining program, and they also wanted to keep as many of our foodservice staff employed as possible,” expla...

Despite the many challenges the foodservice industry faced in 2020, kitchens around the world working with Leanpath still prevented 12 million pounds (or 5 million kilos) of food from being wasted last year. A significant bright spot in an otherwise dark year. This takes Leanpath’s total for the past 6 years alone to 61 million pounds (28 million kilos) of food waste prevented. As we often say, food waste is a nexus issue: when you prevent food waste from happening you also address some of the most pressing environmental problems we f...

In 2019, building on several years of work in providing donations to various non-profit organizations in the food sector, we were excited to formalize and amplify those efforts with the creation of a new and separate structure at Leanpath, the Leanpath 12.3 Initiative. With a name that draws a parallel to Target 12.3 – the UN’s Sustainable Development Goal that calls for cutting global food loss and waste in half by 2030 – we created the Leanpath 12.3 Initiative with a specific purpose: to assist mission-aligned, resource-constrained ...

As we all adjusted to the challenges of 2020, something notable rose to the surface in foodservice: measuring food waste was no longer just a way to cut costs and be more efficient, it became a key tool in the learning and adapting process kitchens went through as they rose to the challenge of the new normal. What a kitchen wasted was one of the few real-time data points it could use to understand what was working and what was not as volumes dropped and service styles changed dramatically. Controlling food waste became more important ...