New Community Plate Waste Tracking Initiative

Have you noticed the new monitor in the entryway at Elm Street Dining Hall? Have you wondered what the monitor is for? It is there to share the quantity of food our community is throwing away. 

Dining Services has been tracking their pre-consumer food waste since the fall of 2015. Pre-consumer food waste is any food item that has not been served. It begins with scraps from food fabrication to pans of food that are left over and cannot be reused as leftovers. Dining Services use waste tracking information as a training tool for cooks to hone their knife skills for cutting meats and vegetables. The front of the house staff collects and logs the waste. The Unit Manager uses this information to improve forecasting menu items for each meal period. 

Leanpath, a software system created by a company from Beaverton, Oregon, is used for this initiative/program. Dining Services can run reports to see trends from meal to meal and beyond.  The waste is collected and weighed in the kitchen on a designated scale. The scale has an attached camera to take a photo of what is being discarded, and there is a tablet to enter details and source of the waste. 

With the success in tracking pre-consumer food waste, Dining Services saw the opportunity to get the PEA Community involved by leveraging another tool from Leanpath called Spark. Spark provides us with the ability to track the plate waste that is generated by diners in the dining hall. All food that is left on the plates going back into the dish room is put in a designated bin, then is weighed on a special scale in the kitchen that has a tablet attached to it. The weight is inputed into the tablet and the information is sent to the monitor that is in the entryway at Elm Street Dining Hall. The monitor will display the up-to-date weight of the plate waste for the community to see. The goal here is to inform the community of how much plate waste is being generated. Once a baseline is created, we are hopeful that community leaders will challenge the community by setting goals to reduce their plate waste.

On average, K-12 students waste an average of 39.2 pounds of food per year. I am sure that Exeter can do their part and skew this number downward. Remember, take what you want but eat what you take.

By ED VASSEUR