Food Waste Intelligence

Six years ago, recognizing the need to drive increased focus on the global food waste challenge, Leanpath partner Compass Group launched an educational campaign designating the last Wednesday in April as Stop Food Waste Day.

Coming just days after Earth Day–with this year’s theme of “Invest in our Planet”–the timing couldn’t be better, because reducing food waste is one of the single most effective levers that the world has to transform the food system. It also is key to accelerate progress toward the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals and stem climate-warming greenhouse gas emissions.

Today, however, it is hard to ignore the financial burden the foodservice industry, and consumers in general, are facing. Global food commodity prices hit an all-time high in March following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, according to the UN Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO). 

Stop Food Waste Day 2022 is a good time to remember that while food waste prevention is one of the most actionable initiatives kitchens can do for the environment, it is also one of the most impactful initiatives for a kitchen’s bottom line.

#1: How Mount Holyoke College used food waste tracking to quickly adapt to COVID-19 changes

As we all adjusted to the challenges of COVID-19, 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 for learning and adapting to the new normal. What a kitchen wastes is one of the few real-time data points it can use to understand what's working and what's not.

Our top blog post of the year took a deep dive into how Mount Holyoke, a women's college in Massachusetts, USA, leveraged food waste tracking to its fullest.

The challenges faced by the foodservice industry in 2021–rising food and labor costs and disrupted supply chains–put a fine point on the need to prevent food waste and its financial burden. The growing body of evidence connecting food waste and climate change created even more urgency for foodservice organizations.

Working with those organizations in over 40 countries, Leanpath and its partners prevented 14 million pounds of food from going to waste, bringing the total impact since 2004–when Leanpath introduced food waste prevention solutions–to 90 million pounds. 

That equates to 75 million meals kept in the food system for those who need them. And over 284 thousand metric tons of CO² kept out of our skies.

Here are a few other highlights from the year:

It’s clear that an organization is doing pioneering work in the food system when the President and the Vice President come to participate, as occurred at DC Central Kitchen (DCCK) just before Thanksgiving.

And we agree.

Leanpath has been proud to partner with DCCK for the past three years through our Leanpath 12.3 initiative, supporting the organization’s transformative work to address hunger and poverty through job training and job creation since its founding by Robert Egger over 30 years ago (read more about DCCK’s history here). 

We’re united by powerful, complementary, and systemic change-focused missions around food.

Aramark Regional Executive Chef Damon Mangano oversees the food and nutrition services at a large Midwestern healthcare system running 11 hospitals. Tracking and preventing food waste with Leanpath since 2017, the system’s kitchens have reduced their cumulative waste 50%.

Chef Damon says from the start, his chefs were startled by the cost of the food they were wasting, which teams see in the Leanpath system as soon as items are tracked.

“From the very start, when cooks saw what the food waste was costing, folk were saying things like, ‘That’s $5000 in a year. Wow, imagine all the stuff we could buy if we didn’t throw that chicken away every night.’”