Christy: Welcome to Green Champions.

Dominique: Thanks for joining us in a conversation with real people sharing sustainability success stories.

Christy: This podcast is a platform for green champions to share their stories and plant new ideas. I'm Christy.

Dominique: And I'm Dominique.

Christy: Today we're back with Andrew Shakman, the CEO of Leanpath who is on a mission to make food waste prevention everyday practice. You can listen to last week's episode to hear more about Andrew's personal journey and what led him to this work.

Andrew, welcome back.

Andrew: Thank you. Happy to be here.

Why a Third of All Food Never Gets Eaten

Dominique: Andrew, last time we got to hear from you on your background in storytelling, how it led you to technology, your passion about solving big problems. And we kind of led all the way to you even got storytelling with food brands, fell in love with this food space, and then learned maybe a little too much about how our food system works and our food waste problem.

Can you just [00:01:00] kind of bring us back there and tell us more about kinda remind us why this topic of food matters to you and that you wanted to be part of our food waste problem?

Andrew: Yes. I mean, I think food is precious and it's of course, critical to sustaining life. But it's also, it is the way that so much of our culture is transmitted, right? We connect with each other through food. We break bread together, families convene together. Friend groups form around food. Food connects everything and is mediated through food. So I think food as a cultural phenomenon in addition to sustaining us physically, it's an incredibly important topic. And then coming to understand its impact environmentally, recognizing that food is of course one of the largest generators of greenhouse gas emissions.

And because we lose or waste a third of the food that's produced, 8-10% of our greenhouse gas emissions are in some way linked to food waste. And so that is a massive problem in terms of climate, but we also are facing massive levels of food insecurity and at [00:02:00] risk of tremendous land conversion and biodiversity loss and water scarcity and food. The usage of our food is all right at the center of that, and that has intrigued me.

The Management Science Kitchens Are Missing

Christy: What is special about Leanpath and how it's tackling this food waste problem?

Andrew: So when we began on this journey, there was really no one working on food waste prevention in food service and hospitality. If it was happening, it was not many people and they were using manual efforts. Chefs were dumping out bins on a loading dock and calling their teams to look at it but that was, in many cases, punitive and it was not a systemic approach to the problem. And so I think the first thing that's distinctive about Leanpath is we saw this opportunity and we recognize that kitchens are really factories, but they are not managed like factories. Meaning there's all this management science that has been developed over the years that has allowed for quality improvement and efficiency.

So, Six Sigma and Lean, and the whole total quality movement [00:03:00] and statistical process control and all this stuff, and none of it was present in kitchens, which were really factories. So we said, gosh, what if we were able to transpose some of those things that worked in those other environments into a food service environment, might we be able to drive transformation?

And what we focused on was implementing a practice of daily measurement. And recognizing that the moment we could get people to measure things, we could then suddenly drive change because people would understand what they were wasting. They would've data to be able to adjust menus and purchasing and production, but they would also have a behavioral element that came with understanding, seeing the problem and being confronted by it visually and sort of making the invisible visible for people.

So that was, I think, a very unique element of Leanpath at the beginning, and I can catch up and tell you how Leanpath's different today, but I think the starting point was just that we saw that problem and we saw that potential for a solution, and we recognized that technology would need to be a part of making that something that was [00:04:00] actually logistically and operationally feasible, given the tremendous demands on food service folks so much pressure and we needed to make this easy for people.

Dominique: Also, my background's in industrial systems engineering. And personally, my story was that I was in school learning about exactly what you're saying of how we process improve for manufacturing.

And I had a similar light bulb of like, why isn't this happening across the street from our university? Why aren't I not seeing this in practice in the cafe I go to, in the restaurant I bring my friends to? But I love the way you framed that from like, let's share this knowledge, let's share the expertise, let's take the same approaches.

And I also wanted to give you a chance to introduce Leanp ath to those that are less familiar. And so you framed the problem, but if I walk into a kitchen where a Leanpath is in use, what is it doing?

What Leanpath Actually Does Inside a Kitchen

Andrew: Imagine you walk into a kitchen and food service or hospitality where food is being prepared. Usually a lot of it, high [00:05:00] volume, usually a lot of diversity of menus. In many cases, those menus are not the same every day, they change all the time. Because in the environments where Leanpath is used, often the people who are dining are regulars. They are university students who eat there every day in a dining hall or staff members in a hospital who work and eat there every day. Or employees in a corporate dining facility, or people in a military base or on a military base, et cetera.

in that world, we have constant challenge around trying to figure out how much to make and what are people gonna actually want tomorrow. that's where Leanpath is functioning. And what we do is we implement a solution that involves a place to track food waste.

So usually it's next to where people are cleaning their pans and it's a pot wash area. And literally they come along and they hold up a pan and dump it into the bin. And today, there's a camera above it, it identifies what the food is when it dumps into the bin. There's a scale underneath the bin, it identifies what the [00:06:00] weight is, puts all that together, figures out what the value of that item was based on what it was and how much of it was wasted. So that's quantification and classification. Sometimes we get information like why it was thrown away, the loss reason, which then allows us to track back to root causes.

All that data flows up into the cloud where we make sense of it in a platform called Leanpath Online. And then we propose action steps that people take to move from information to action and outcomes, in terms of proposing things to focus on, breaking a big problem down into measurable bite-sized pieces that they can work on and get reinforcement over time.

So in total, we talk about that at Leanpath as being tracking, discovering and driving improvement. Track, discover, drive: that's what Leanpath provides. And we do all of that within the context of program design and management. So, we recognize that those three things, track, discover, drive, have to happen in every food service operation. But to be able to do this at scale, you [00:07:00] have to not just do those things in the units, you have to be able to manage many, many units that are doing those things.

And so today, Leanpath is an enterprise food waste management platform that consists of measurement and action in the unit, but also measurement and action above the unit, allowing people to see a complete portfolio of sites, understand people who are doing it well, people who aren't, people who need support, being able to drive action within those organizations. And so today, we're able to help some of the largest food service and hospitality organizations take control of food waste and dramatically reduce the amount that's produced and save money and do the right thing for the environment.

And often in the course of that to recover excess edible food that can then be either donated or repurposed.

Christy: Andrew, thinking about those actions that you are asking sites to implement, what are some of those actions?

Andrew: So the first action is to measure waste. So we want you to do that, but we wanna make that as easy as we possibly can. And when I look at the [00:08:00] journey from the very early days of Leanpath when it was, the Neanderthal era and people were moving data around on USB sticks and things like that, to now. We have been constantly guided by the goal of making it faster and easier.

So now with AI, machine vision or computer vision doing the classification, it becomes something that's really touchless or can be touchless. It depends how one of our clients wants to implement that, but that's the first thing we ask people to do is to measure.

And then the second thing we ask them to do is to make sure that they have leadership in their organization. And we know that change doesn't happen by itself. I wish it did. But change happens because people want it to happen. And the equation for change, we think of as change is a function of the model you're changing to, the process by which you're changing and the level of dissatisfaction with the prior or present reality.

And so you've gotta have all three of those things: a good model, a good process, and a level of [00:09:00] dissatisfaction that causes people to feel urgency to drive change. And so that's the next step, is we've gotta have a champion in each operation who sees it and is willing to lead. And that's usually a chef or a production manager, sometimes it's a sous chef, but someone who's in the kitchen and is willing to elevate this and usually joined by a co-champion so that you have coverage if someone's not there. So measuring waste on a daily basis, classifying and quantifying, and then having leadership. And then from there, what we asked people to do is actually use the data to drive change.

And in the past that meant go study your data and figure out what to do. In the modern era, that's not the case. And we know that most chefs, in fact, all chefs, I'm gonna go out on a limb here. Most all chefs did not get into food because they wanted to sit in front of a computer in their office.

And so the goal now is, it now is to use AI to be able to deliver to them actionable insights. Here's exactly what to talk to your team about today at your pre-shift meeting. Here is exactly the stuff that's causing you the [00:10:00] problem that you should work on, and you should set a goal around it and here are things you can do to make change around that.

Those kinds of things are now instrumented with AI in our systems. And so what we're asking people to do is measure, have leadership, and then work to take those prompts that the system gives them and make them real. And when you do that, you have pretty dramatic opportunities for improvement.

Dominique: I love that you spoke about kind of that evolution with technology too 'cause I was gearing up to ask you how you've seen that role of technology change. And I think it's also notable that you've been doing this for quite some time. Leanpath was not brought about by AI and some of the things that might make it easier. So when did Leanpath officially get started?

Andrew: So, we got started in 2004 which is a very long time ago. And at that time, just to put it in perspective, like we didn't have these, they, 

Dominique: Andrew's holding up his phone.

Andrew: Yeah. Holding up my Android phone, my Pixel. And so, the world has changed a lot. And [00:11:00] in that era it was, it was a lot about manual effort and we were replacing a really manual process of writing stuff down on a clipboard with putting things into digital tools that were more efficient than the handwritten process. But then it's just continued on from there. And at this point, it's, we're using AI and we're using as much as we can, the most modern toolkit, if it makes sense to save people time and make it easier to do this. So the technology's evolved but the core concept of raising awareness and driving change around food waste is the same.

Touchless Tracking Without Thoughtless Wasting

Andrew: And one of the things I share with our team is one of our greatest strengths at Leanpath is that we've been doing this for so long, 22 years. But I point out that's also one of our greatest potential weaknesses if we allow things we learned yesterday to limit our thinking about tomorrow. And so we've gotta constantly be bringing that curiosity and that beginner's mindset to the problems that we're solving and be willing to throw out the stuff we did yesterday if it [00:12:00] no longer is the best approach.

And so we've been really thoughtful about where to set those points of evolution. One of the things that's been interesting, for example, has been touchless tracking versus thoughtless tracking. For a long time, it's been important to us that there's some degree of mindfulness and consciousness that when you throw something away, you go, "Oh. That's worth $20. And now I'm thinking about it and I'm modifying my behavior." How can we make that tracking process touchless and fast, but still not have a thoughtless environment where people forget that the waste is happening? So finding a path to those kinds of points of balance between behavior and operational excellence is a constant area for evolution and improvement.

Dominique: Well, I was just curious to get a mental image of 2004 when you're walking around with Leanpath, being like, "Please put my product in your kitchen." Was there a camera involved? Like how different did it look at that time?

Andrew: Yeah, no camera in the first generation. So the very first, very first product didn't even have a touchscreen. It was like very, very rudimentary. And [00:13:00] then we added a touchscreen and it wasn't networked, and then it became networked and talked to the Cloud, and that's when we put a camera on it in 2013.

And at that time, we knew that machine vision was coming. Our goal was to begin originating a collection of images, and we knew that images told a better story and we spoke in our prior conversation about storytelling, and certainly a picture is worth a thousand words. And so being able to show a culinarian a photo of what happened, we knew would give them richer insight than just seeing a data point in a report.

So we started taking the images knowing that that had value unto itself, but also looking forward to the point where all of those labeled images would help us to actually bring machine vision, computer vision into the process. And so that was 2013.

We started working on computer vision in the late teens. And we then had some choices to make over whether we thought what the industry needed to drive change was the machine vision or models for Scaled Impact. And [00:14:00] we made a decision to focus on scale and we built the largest food waste prevention program in the world with one of our clients in many, many countries.

And our goal there was to get something that was the right mix between investment level being low enough, but impact being high enough with a high integrity process. And then as we felt like the cost of AI was getting to the point where people could afford it, we swung around and brought that into the product line.

And so, that's been our journey, is try to find the right technology at the right time. And today, we're looking for every possible efficiency that we can bring to our customers with AI correctly deployed.

Christy: You just recently launched a product that is focused on plate waste as well. Incorporation of that, could you talk to us, let our listeners know what is plate waste, why was that important? And tell us more about this current evolution of where the product is and the importance of that evolution.

Andrew: So plate waste is what's left on a diner's plate after they've eaten. So it's a different problem than the [00:15:00] problem that we have been primarily focused on, which is pre-consumer waste, which is food that's wasted within the control and custody of the food service operator. So that would be overproduction, spoilage, expiration, trimmings of fresh meat and produce. That's all stuff that a food service operator can influence.

Plate waste on the other hand, is something that a guest is ultimately not consuming and throwing away. So it's a really important part of the problem because it depends on the type of operation, but it's probably a third to half the problem, and we don't wanna ignore that. And the levers for change or the theories of change there are a little bit different. One theory of change is that if you can understand what's being wasted, you can change menus. So if you find that this side dish with this entree, people don't like it, that's a learning.

If people don't like the way that preparation's done, the seasoning or something, they don't like it. If the portions are wrong, if you're putting on too big a portion of this, then you're gonna find that it's routinely ending up on the plate.

So there's some amount of menu [00:16:00] analysis that happens.

But then there's also a behavioral element, particularly in environments where food is provided, where it might be like a hotel banquet or buffet or a college dining hall or a cruise ship buffet. Anywhere where you can just take food and you're not paying for it a la carte, those are environments where if we can get people to be aware to just take what they're going to eat and then know they can go back and get more, we can have a pretty significant impact on plate waste. So that's the problem, Christy. It's a definitely, it's an opportunity zone and the theories are; improve the menu, change the behavior.

And so with Leanpath, we've now implemented an end-to-end solution that includes classifying and quantifying, and we've partnered with a company called Kikleo in France that's doing a great job on that classification element on particularly food waste on conveyor belts.

And then we bring that into Leanpath online and we put that into the context of pre-consumer food waste. And we're able to also think about [00:17:00] do we have a complete view of the waste? Is there any kind of sampling or scaling that needs to be done? And then from there we have the ability with a product called Spark, to actually move all that data right out onto signage that we put in front of guests so we can actually use behavioral science to help people understand, "Hey, this is how many meals have been lost today. Just be thoughtful about what you take." And we're getting to a point where that conversation is one that more operators are willing to have. And in the past, that was less of the case because they were scared that people would think that they were taking value away.

Dominique: And that human component is so important. And I also just appreciate how much you think about the people in the system that you're impacting and just like the real human component of all of this, because it's so much more productive talking about this without bad actors, but more just like bad habits or preconceived notions.

Why There Are No Bad Actors in Food Waste

Andrew: Dominique, I'm convinced there really are very, very few bad actors. I think, in terms of this, in terms of food waste, I don't think most anyone comes to work planning or wanting to waste food. And in fact, I think [00:18:00] most people working at front lines in food service really value food. They're often not compensated at a high level, I would say, almost universally, not compensated at a high level.

They are working hard, many times they have multiple jobs. In many cases they are struggling and they know the value of food and they see that loss. So I don't think anyone wants to waste.

I think what happens is waste occurs because the system is designed to use waste as a buffer or a clutch for other things. Like we don't wanna run out of food, so we make more than we need. We don't want a food safety problem, so we throw away perfectly healthy food just to be sure. And so those kinds of things around risk management enter it into it much more than any bad actors. And I think once you take that approach, what was super exciting for me was when I realized not only were there not bad actors, but that actually frontline food service workers are the global change makers on this problem. And they don't in many cases, know that.

And so it's exciting to be able to say, do you [00:19:00] know how big a problem this is? And do you know you, uniquely you, have the opportunity to make a huge impact here? And it's a very exciting message to be able to deliver. But more importantly, it's humbling to see people pick it up and go, "Yes. Those are my values and I want to be part of making this better." And, I'm not Pollyanna. I know that not everybody is gonna react that way, but many do.

Christy: You mentioned in our first conversation about your background that you wanna work on consequential problems and you are, and you're helping others. You're bringing others to work on that consequential problem. And in this year, I believe, that Leanpath and all your partners have prevented over a hundred million pounds of food waste and obviously counting, continue to grow that. When you hear that number, Andrew, what does it represent to you? 'Cause it's hard to envision a hundred million pounds prevented, a food prevented, I should say.

Andrew: Yeah, and it's always evolving, right, and going up. And so it's a moving [00:20:00] target on where we are in that number, obviously all accretive. But yeah, it's hard to take a big number and put it into, a scale that we get. Often we will convert it into the number of meals that were prevented from going into the garbage and sort of think of it that way, like if a meal weighs 1.2 pounds, how many meals were diverted from going into waste and instead that food resource was conserved. To me, that's probably one of the most clear ways of thinking about what does that cumulative impact mean because a meal we understand, as an impact, a really important resource for one individual at a moment in their day. So that's one way of thinking of it. For chefs, I have found though, that there is an interest in other kinds of storytelling and what we think of as vivid equivalencies.

So somehow along the way, at one point we started talking about, "Hey, the amount of food waste that you have lost here is the equivalent of [00:21:00] six elephants," and people like woke up to that. They loved it. And you would see chefs talking about it to their team, "Guys, we threw away six elephants worth of food waste. We need to stop doing that." And it became like this shorthand. I'd come in kitchens and find like pictures of elephants, like it stacked like a thermometer on a wall. And when you think about it, it's a mixed metaphor.

It doesn't make a lot of sense, a thermometer of elephants on the wall, yet it made total sense in a food service environment because you got it, like an elephant worth of food waste is a lot. And so I think being able to tell those stories in different ways is part of the fun and always trying to find a way to make it more resonant. And the more personal you can make it, the more fun you can make it in terms of like, we're making progress and it's meaningful, the better.

Dominique: And when you kicked this off, Andrew, you talked about the fact that the thing kitchens were most concerned about at the beginning was money. Seeing the many elephants in your kitchen, I think also the opens the door to like, we paid for all the elephants, like we had to bring that material in.

Can you tell us just about what the conversations [00:22:00] have been like with making progress in these kitchen spaces around the impact of food, actually seeing savings, by preventing waste?

Andrew: And I really believe that that's at the core of almost all of our clients' efforts around this. They may also have very serious intention around sustainability. But usually there's also food productivity that's in the mix. And we find that when people start implementing Leanpath, they can cut their pre-consumer food waste in half or better and save 2-6% of their food purchases. And in a thin margin business, that is a very significant amount of improvement.

And once they do that, it takes a couple of years to optimize and optimize. And then the effort converts from being a reduction effort to being a control and maintaining and cost avoidance effort. And so, you drive it down and then you work to hold it. And the holding of course, is itself quite a trick because nothing is [00:23:00] actually static in food service operations.

You have turnover in the frontline team, turnover in managers, changes in menus, changes in seasons, changes in suppliers, changes in consumer preferences. And so what you start to believe and see over time is that this is a super dynamic thing that's always changing and so you have a choice to make.

And the choice is, do I wanna be in control of food waste or will I allow it to be out of my control? And if you choose to be in control, you need to have ongoing measurement. And when you do that, you will indeed pay for that effort through cost reduction and cost avoidance.

Dominique: That was beautifully put of the impact Leanpath has on your clients.

Andrew: And that's the financial side. I think we also have a lot of impact on employee engagement.

Dominique: Oh, absolutely. 

Andrew: And, of course, environmental and social. Yeah. 

Dominique: But even just those stats are, are so helpful to get a sense of how you are also just building a tool that really supports this industry that needs more [00:24:00] profitability, frankly, so.

Christy: Leanpath takes great pride in sharing in the academic studies and influencing all of the work, for folks even outside that circle. I think that you might wanna just share a little bit more about that to bring us home. 

Andrew: I would definitely say it's Leanpath, all of us, it's a team of incredibly dedicated, mission-driven folks who do an amazing job. And we are a B Corp, which means we're a public benefit corp. We're focused not just on building a great business financially, but also building an impactful business.

And along the way, as the category creators, we started to just inhabit a role of educating people, and we felt like that was part of what we should be doing. And so we have, I think since the beginning really been looking to share our knowledge and help to build this movement, and we have worked with competitors, we've worked with NGOs. We've worked in a variety of contexts to try to advance practice, and we continue to do that. We have an initiative called our 12.3 initiative, which is related to sustainable [00:25:00] development goal 12.3, where in some cases we donate our equipment to people who couldn't afford it, but can make an impact on food waste.

We work with researchers, we share data, some de-identified data in a variety of things, but to help people find insights around this. And that's an important part of what we're doing overall, is having that broader catalytic impact and helping to shape not just the work that we do, but we've been, frankly, really, we don't like to lose to a competitor, but we are excited that competitors have joined us in this journey and have built an ecosystem in doing work around a variety of these areas. And so today, there's now an ecosystem of innovators that are working to help people solve this problem, and that's very exciting.

Dominique: Andrew, thank you so much for talking to us about Leanpath and walking us through how this shows up in kitchens, why it's so important, how you think about the people. And I will be sitting with the visual of thinking of kitchens as factories. And I think that's just a really cool [00:26:00] perspective, that is not said enough for how much it really hits home.

Thank you so much for walking us through the way you've made large scale impact in this space. How can people connect with you or learn more about Leanpath? 

Andrew: Leanpath.com. We have a lot of resources, recorded webinars, white papers, eBooks, blogs. We are constantly publishing and we just want that knowledge to go into the world. So please go to leanpath.com. And then I'm on LinkedIn, Andrew Shakman.

Dominique: And something we didn't explicitly call out in this episode, but I wanna make sure we say Leanpath is a global impact organization. Is that true?

Andrew: Yes. We have customers in over 50 countries and we have team members in Europe, Australia, and North America. And we're constantly working to bring these tools to places that need us around the world. And it operates now in over 35 languages, I think. It's evolving always.

Dominique: Wow. Well, thank you for bringing your story to us today us today.

Andrew: Thank you for having me. It's a pleasure chatting with you.

Christy: Awesome. Thanks [00:27:00] for joining us. Each guest brings a different approach to sustainability. We're here to highlight the people doing the work that inspires others because climate action takes many forms.

Dominique: As always, you can find our episodes and support the show at thegreenchampions.com. If you enjoyed the episode, please follow, subscribe, and leave us a review on your favorite podcast platform. Stay connected with us on LinkedIn and Instagram, @greenchampionspod. Our music is by Zayn Dweik. Thanks for joining us today for an episode of Green Champions. We'll be back next time with another sustainability success story.