Food Waste Intelligence

The latest report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change added further urgency to addressing the environmental crisis, predicting catastrophic temperature increases by the 2030s unless immediate action is undertaken.

The report highlighted those eight key activities, four of which are related to food waste prevention.

How do you provide great hospitality in some of the most inhospitable places on earth, without food waste costing the earth financially and environmentally? I asked Winston Hugh, Compass Group Australia’s National Food Waste Reduction Manager (what a great job title!).

An Exec Chef by background, Winston knows his apples when it comes to commercial kitchen operations. He’s also Canadian, so he’s no stranger to wide open spaces. Compass Group Australia’s Leanpath programme is overseen by him, and I was curious to find out what it’s really like to fight food waste in their Defence, Offshore and Remote (DOR) sites, which are often hundreds of miles from the nearest town. Think huge mining sites at the end of a long and dusty supply line with buffets for thousands of hungry miners, or barracks feeding servicemen and women on a large scale. Places where, to mis-quote AC/DC’s Angus Young, “It’s a Long Way to the Shop if you Wanna Sausage Roll.”

Today, on March 8, at the Multi-Unit Restaurant Technology Conference (MURTEC) Conference in Las Vegas, Leanpath was very excited to be recognized by Hospitality Technology as a winner of the 2023 Industry Heroes Award.

A strong argument has to be made to bring any new equipment or process into a busy foodservice kitchen, and food waste prevention technology is no exception.

Our recent webinar, “Making the Business Case for Food Waste Prevention,” now available on demand, lays out the triple-bottom-line argument for implementing a food waste prevention system. It frames the business case in addressing the key stakeholder groups most likely to be involved in making the decision: the culinary, finance, operations and sustainability teams.

Watch the 45-minute webinar here and keep reading for some key takeaways.

With food and labor costs still at record highs and supply chain disruptions continuing, an obvious point of leverage for the foodservice industry is buying more pre-prepped frozen foods. And a new survey shows that increasingly the industry is doing just that.

Despite the benefits to reducing the potential for food waste, there are still best practices to follow to make sure those increased purchases of frozen product don't lead to increased food waste.