Food Waste Intelligence

Questions. Everyone has them. I have been fortunate enough to work with hundreds of organizations and thousands of chefs and most of them have the same thing in common: they have a food waste problem and they want a solution for it. I get asked A LOT of questions. Most of the questions I get asked are about repurposing - like, “Chef, do you have a recipe for orange peels?” or “What do I do with leftover pizza dough?” Most of these types of questions have to do with chefs looking for recipes or ideas to creatively turn trim waste or overproduced food into a profit-generating menu item.  I am always happy to help a fellow chef find a solution.

Outside of being a consultant and a walking recipe database, I do get asked many questions that seem to resurface on a regular basis.  Below are the 5 most common questions that come up; let’s see if these solutions can apply to your kitchen.

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.

UK-based WRAP, the Waste Resources Action Programme, recently announced a food waste reduction campaign entitled “Wasting food: it’s out of date.” This is a highly visual effort to convey the scale of the food waste challenge through eye-opening facts (ex. the UK discards 20 million slices of bread daily) and the associated deep environmental, social, and financial impacts (ex. over 500,000 acres of land are unnecessarily used to produce the inputs for that wasted bread).

Building on WRAP’s Love Food, Hate Waste work, the idea is to further educate UK citizens on the severity of the food waste challenge and catalyze change at the consumer level, where 70% of the UK’s food waste occurs.

Today isn’t just any Earth Day, it’s the 50th Earth Day. And to celebrate we’ve collected 50 of our top food waste prevention tips for the kitchen, whether the foodservice or home kitchen. It’s cliché, but in kitchens preventing food waste, every day is Earth Day. We’re proud to help kitchens around the world bring the mission of a more sustainable planet to their teams and their work. Enjoy!

CBORD, an integrated technology provider, hosted a webinar focusing on the many challenges that COVID-19 poses for healthcare foodservice professionals. Panelists from Indiana University Health and Duke Raleigh Hospital shared stories and strategies they've implemented to keep their patients and teams safe and nourished amid this crisis. We've included our key takeaways from this valuable call and a link to the full webinar for you.