Reduce your restaurant waste with big data

Reducing food waste must be the first priority to ensure a sustainable food supply chain.

New technologies are transforming the way we see waste. We all know that food is too valuable to waste and that technology can transform the way we prepare it. By addressing food waste aggressively and strategically, we can all benefit from a more efficient and robust food supply chain.

Every day, the world wastes about a third of all food that is grown sometime between farm and fork. This equates to more than $ 1 trillion in waste or more than 1 percent of global production. As the world reflects on how to feed the growing population in the next 30 years, we must start by reducing this waste.

Only in the last 10 years have we really begun to understand the magnitude of this problem. Now that we appreciate the level of waste that exists in our world, it’s time we moved from talking about why waste is a problem to finding solutions to address it.

The good news is that reducing food waste is beneficial to everyone in the supply chain. At each point, there is an opportunity to be more efficient or to find new food outlets that would not otherwise be used.

• Producers find new outlets to sell products that their existing producers are unable or unwilling to buy.
• Food distributors improve their forecasting and purchasing techniques or obtain tax benefits by donating food to those in need.
• Restaurants produce the right food and put the right product in front of their customers.
• Consumers become more demanding about what they buy.

In all cases, we save money while decreasing the needs for more intensive agriculture as food demands continue to increase with growing populations.

Reduce food waste with innovations from other industries

We are in the nascent stages of innovation when it comes to reducing food waste, particularly with technology. There are only a handful of companies trying to solve this problem, and yet the size of the opportunity is enormous. This is bound to change.

Despite the magnitude of the problem, this is a very solvable problem. The first innovations to reduce waste, as the company Winnow, are showing that waste can be reduced by more than 50 percent. The solutions are taking parallels from other companies to solve similar problems and apply them to this problem.

These solutions are divided into three parts:

• Big Data: what is measured is improved. Today, there is only scant data on what is wasted. Accurately recording what is wasteful and why, and then using that data to gain insight into how to change people’s behavior and operating practices has tremendous power. Once you know where the waste is occurring, improved forecasting and production planning allow you to tackle the problem at its root cause.
• New markets– We clearly know in advance when something is likely to go to waste. Identifying the companies or individuals who will buy that product and use it before it expires is a new source of income. Today, there are companies that do this at the farm level (Food Cowboys) and at home (Olio).
• Extension of expiration dates– A host of new solutions are looking at how we can extend the shelf life of products and other foods to make sure they can last until consumed.

At Winnow they focus on the big data area. They found that kitchens simply don’t know how much is wasted, and that many large kitchens waste 20 percent of the food they buy.

This is not because of incompetence, but because they lack the correct tools. By monitoring waste with their technology, they help chefs improve their cooking practices and achieve significant savings.

The mission of this company is to help solve the problem of restaurants on a global scale. They already have them in six countries and are saving their clients millions. However, they are only scratching the surface of the service they want to offer.

There are so many opportunities to combat waste in the food supply chain and enormous wealth and impact that can be generated by doing so.