Food Waste Intelligence

New research on behalf of the U.N.’s Champions 12.3 finds there is a strong business case for foodservice operators serving hospitals, schools, sports arenas and other facilities to reduce food waste. The Business Case for Reducing Food Loss and Waste: Catering shows that for every $1 caterers invested in programs to curb food waste, they saved more than $6 in operating costs. (“Catering” here refers to “contract catering” or “foodservice contract management.”)

Companies Save $14 on Every $1 Invested in Reducing Food Waste Earlier this month a new report was released from Champions 12.3, in collaboration with the World Resources Institute (WRI) and WRAP, that found companies saved $14 for every $1 invested in reducing food waste. This report, which includes customer-protected data from LeanPath among the data set, is very favorable financial validation of the food waste prevention work that LeanPath has led for the past 13 years. It supports the fact that if organizations, consumers and gove...

Continuing the push for more food waste legislation, United States Congress Representatives Marcia L. Fudge (D-OH), Dan Newhouse (R-WA), Chellie Pingree (D-ME) and James P. McGovern (D-MA) introduced The Food Donation Act of 2017 (H.R. 952) earlier this month. The bill amends The Bill Emerson Good Samaritan Food Donation Act (the Emerson Act), which was passed in 1996 to encourage food donation by offering protection from liability to those who donate food in good faith.

The food waste movement has come a long way in recent years, moving definitively into the mainstream of sustainability conversations. Television hosts and celebrity chefs are talking about it, and businesses and governments are setting goals to reduce it. The EPA’s food recovery hierarchy is the long-time accepted standard for best practices in food waste reduction, with prevention firmly established at the top as the optimal solution. And though there are various techniques for prevention, daily measurement of waste is emerging as a ...

One of our core beliefs at LeanPath is that we manage what we measure. It’s at the heart of our mission of making food waste prevention easy: measurement leads to understanding which leads to prevention. When LeanPath was founded in 2004, the concept of measuring food waste was largely a foreign one in many kitchens—that’s why we’re especially excited that last month, the Food Loss & Waste Protocol launched the Food Loss and Waste Accounting and Reporting (FLW) Standard, a first-of-its-kind framework designed to help organizations, na...