Food Waste Intelligence

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,” explains Dining Services Manager Shawn Kelsey. “We opened half of our food stations and made sure we had a lot of offerings. The students got a great experience, but we knew food waste and diversion was going to be an immense challenge.”

The kitchen utilized the Leanpath tracking system to its full potential by reviewing food waste reports, sharing that data with the staff and quickly incorporating innovative ideas to prevent the waste going forward.

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 face. With the prevention of 61 million pounds of food waste, Leanpath clients also prevented over 24 billion gallons of water from being wasted, 194 thousand metric tonnes of CO2 emissions, and kept 51 million meals in the food system.

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 nonprofits and educational institutions in advancing their work on food waste prevention.

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 than ever. And the need for food waste intelligence was as important as always. Here are the 5 blog posts our audience found most valuable in a year full of surprises.

UK-based WRAP, the Waste Resources Action Programme, recently announced a food waste reduction campaign entitled “Wasting food: it’s out of date.” This is a highly visual effort to convey the scale of the food waste challenge through eye-opening facts (ex. the UK discards 20 million slices of bread daily) and the associated deep environmental, social, and financial impacts (ex. over 500,000 acres of land are unnecessarily used to produce the inputs for that wasted bread).

Building on WRAP’s Love Food, Hate Waste work, the idea is to further educate UK citizens on the severity of the food waste challenge and catalyze change at the consumer level, where 70% of the UK’s food waste occurs.