Food Waste Intelligence

Trim waste is the second largest source of food waste in kitchens, just behind overproduction. Some trim waste is unavoidable. Regardless, it all represents a financial hit: while you may not eat an orange peel, your kitchen still paid for it. And protein trimmings are most costly than ever.

So it’s important to make sure your kitchen accumulates as little trim waste as possible.

To help with that, here are four questions to ask your kitchen manager, chef or frontline team to make sure reducing trim waste is top of mind.

As Leanpath's full time Executive Chef, I've trained and coached hundreds of chefs and managers on preventing food waste in their operations. One of the most persistent issues is also one of the most avoidable: food waste from items expiring in storage. Avoiding this waste takes establishing and following strict processes to ensure everything in storage is used before it can expire. Here are three questions to ask yourself or your team to find out how effective your kitchen is at avoiding expired food waste.

Healthcare is the most complex foodservice segment by far. Most have some mix of retail foodservice, catering, physician dining, other services like day care, and, of course, patient feeding with its clinical demands. Perhaps as a result of the complexity, healthcare foodservice, compared to other segments, also sees the highest rates of food waste, based on Leanpath data.

All facets of the foodservice industry have been affected by COVID-19, including food suppliers. The vendor partners we get our meats, seafood, and produce from are also seeing significant challenges as demand for products has reduced and supply in some areas is excessively high. The problem is, because demand is reduced, suppliers have more product on hand. This can sometimes lead to deliveries coming later in the window of freshness, which increases the risk of food waste. This is creating two issues: one, kitchens have to retrain their staff on inspecting produce; and two, operators need to figure out ways to use produce faster when they do get poor quality.

If you want your work addressing food waste to have the biggest impact on greenhouse gas emissions, prevent food waste to begin with, don’t rely on anaerobic digesters to deal with it. That’s the finding from a new report from UK-based food systems research group Feedback Global.