Food Waste Intelligence

Carle Foundation Hospital in Urbana, Illinois, United States, is a 489-bed facility with more than 8,300 team members. Its foodservice operation includes room service; a retail café with scratch-made meals that operates 20 hours a day; an ancillary retail location with pizzas, sandwiches and salads; and a staff dining area. It serves an average of 3,000 retail meals and 1,000 patient meals per day.

Carle Health is committed to building a legacy of sustainability, guided by the direct link between environmental health and population health. In mid-2024, Carle Foundation Hospital launched the Leanpath intelligent food waste prevention system.

According to Director of Food & Nutrition Services Kevin Steffes, the hospital’s sustainability manager was looking for a program that could make a quick impact and “report out real numbers.” 

The team has already cut its food waste by 36 percent.

“When you think about the amount of food waste that accumulates and the number of people who don’t have access to food, preventing food waste is the right thing to do,” says Steffes. “But when we think about it at the financial level, it’s a double whammy. We’re wasting food that we purchased, but we’re also wasting all the time that it took to procure and prepare that food.”

Leveraging AI

Leanpath enables the foodservice team to track their food waste, generating valuable data on what is being wasted and why. Equipped with this information, they can make smart adjustments to purchasing, prep and menuing to stop that waste from reoccurring. AI-enabled tools also scan the site's data and generate customized recommendations for preventing that kitchen’s specific food waste.

“All of the recommendations the Leanpath AI tool provides are valuable,” says Steffes. “We're a large facility, we've got a lot going on. I've got a production supervisor that's got 20 direct reports. I don't want him spending hours trying to analyze data. But he can easily go into Leanpath and spend 15 minutes and see what it is recommending his team do and where they should be focused.”

Staff embraced the program

The team embraced Leanpath from the start. “The adoption rate from the frontline staff was much greater than I thought it would be,” says Steffes. “They’ve even started to interact with the leaders of the production areas when they think we’re prepping too much food. And that’s exactly what we want. We want the frontline teams pushing us.

“To see the staff engaged at that level is one of the most exciting things for me.”

Steffes attributes that quick embrace to the work he and the leadership team did to explain the “why” of Leanpath. They walked the team through the financial and environmental impact of food waste and the benefits the hospital would accrue through food waste tracking and prevention.

“For a lot of them, they were like, “It’s about time. I’m glad we’re doing something about this,” says Steffes.

Going from data to action

With team engagement came a wealth of Leanpath data that showed, like many kitchens, overproduction was the biggest driver of food waste at Carle Foundation Hospital. Increased communication between the front and back of the house has helped, allowing the kitchen crew to adjust production as demand wanes.

They are focusing on more batch cooking, especially for vegetable sides. They are also reducing the amount of merchandising at the salad bar, to reduce waste there. 

“Our staff has started to think, ‘Ok, we’re approaching the end of the week on the salad bar, do we really need to have that full pan out on a Thursday.’ They are making the critical decision to display less to make sure we don’t have a lot of waste on Friday.”

In their North Star Café, they were seeing a lot of wasted bread. “We’ve got one production person up there and she started communicating more robustly with the leaders to adjust purchasing. She’s now managing production in a more just-in-time way.”

The team has started making repurposing recommendations as well. “We overproduced seafood, so they suggested we make a chowder and put it in the staff lounge.”

“Honestly,” continues Steffes, “it’s been mainly about increasing awareness. Leanpath keeps us focused on food waste and the staff is thinking about when they make decisions. And that really happened organically once we started using the Leanpath platform.”