Food Waste Intelligence

Leanpath CEO Andrew Shakman shared his view of the past, present and future of food waste at the 25th annual Chef's Culinary Conference at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst.

The easiest way to understand one part of the cost of doing nothing about your food waste problem is to use our Savings Opportunity Calculator. This will tell you, based on the size of your operation, how much you stand to save by preventing food waste with Leanpath. What you stand to save is another way of understanding what it’s costing you to ignore food waste.

But there’s another cost that is less precise but perhaps even more critical: every day you do nothing about food waste, you are sacrificing your competitive advantage.

One of the biggest sources of food waste is trim waste from fruits, vegetables and meats. Some trim waste is inevitable. For that, try to repurpose using my guide to repurpose commonly wasted foods. But some trim waste is created because of poor knife skills: a quarter of a bell pepper is left on top, meat comes off when fat is trimmed. Teaching proper knife skills is critical. Find out the chef on your team who is best with knives and have him or her give a tutorial. Short of that, we've collected some great knife skills videos to help out with teaching the basics. 

It can be hard to picture something that isn't there. And that's exactly what food waste prevention creates: food waste that is not there anymore. It's why prevention is such a powerful solution. Other options for dealing with food waste - like diversion to compost or donations - have their place, but they only deal with food waste after it is created, after you've incurred their cost, and after it's had substantial environmental impact. Using Leanpath's food waste data, we've created a visual to help you "see" prevention.

Leanpath works in a lot of kitchens. Over 2,500 in more than 30 countries. Our food waste tracking and analytics help these teams understand where their food waste is coming from and why it’s happening. Once they understand that, I work with a lot of them to then figure out strategies to start preventing the waste from happening.