Food Waste Intelligence

For many years, we at LeanPath have talked about the “romance of composting.” We have found in our work on this issue that when people are putting food back into the soil rather than sending it to rot in a landfill, they often think they have checked the box or closed the loop on addressing wasted food within their organization. This tends to translate into a feeling that they don’t need to worry about food waste prevention strategies since they are already composting. And our hypothesis has always been that they may even become waste...

3 things you can do today to shift behaviors in your team. If you follow LeanPath and our food waste blog, you’ve likely heard us say this: food waste is a behavioral issue. You can implement processes, use technology, create mandates—but at the end of the day, if we can’t change behaviors, then we can’t begin to solve this problem.

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 ...

We all know that controlling costs is critical to running a successful business, especially in foodservice. Recently the cost of labor has been top-of-mind, as various pieces of legislation take effect to raise the minimum wage in certain parts of the United States. How to react to this challenge? After years of optimizing labor, operators have few opportunities to reduce labor without damaging their business in fundamental ways. Raising menu prices to offset the increases isn’t often viable, nor will it please customers. So what can ...

A recent study on awareness and attitudes around food waste in the United States has yielded some interesting findings. The study, conducted by Danyi Qi and Brian Roe of Ohio State University, shows that while awareness around the food waste crisis is growing, there is a significant discrepancy among how people perceive their role in fighting food waste. The survey focuses on consumer attitudes of household food waste, but unsurprisingly, many of the findings parallel similar issues we encounter in the commercial foodservice industry....