Food Waste Intelligence

As Leanpath's full time Executive Chef, I've trained and coached hundreds of chefs and managers on preventing food waste in their operations. When you spend this much time with frontline foodservice workers, hearing their food waste successes and horror stories, valuable trends emerge. One of the most aggravating food loss reasons I hear about all the time is equipment failure. As chefs and managers, we trust our kitchen tools, sometimes too much. Here are a few questions to ask your staff to prevent food waste due to equipment failure.

Food waste prevention is a mission, and mission-driven companies have an easier time recruiting and retaining staff. With foodservice turnover rates at 70% and higher, giving staff a reason to see their work as bigger than themselves, bigger than one shift or daypart, is not just nice, but necessary. Food waste prevention can do that. Here are 5 ways to get your staff engaged in the mission.

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.