Episode 79: Food Waste Is A Nexus Issue (Transcript)

[00:00:00] Liz Bothwell: Hi everyone, welcome to Waste360's NothingWasted! Podcast. On every episode, we invite the most interesting people in waste recycling and organics to sit down with us and chat candidly about their thoughts, their work, this unique industry and so much more. Thanks for listening and enjoy this episode.

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[00:00:25] Liz: Hi everyone, this is Liz Bothwell from Waste360 with Andrew Shakman, CEO and Co-Founder of LeanPath. Welcome, Andrew, thanks for being on the show today.

[00:00:35] Andrew Shakman: Hi, Liz. I'm excited to be here.

[00:00:36] Liz: Great. On this show, we usually start in the beginning, Andrew. Please, tell me about your background, how you ended up in food waste, and at LeanPath.

[00:00:45] Andrew: I can assure you I did not write food waste prevention advocate in third grade, when I was asked what I was going to do when I grew up. My path was somewhat nonlinear to get here, I actually started in the entertainment world, I was really interested in how narrative could drive social change, and thought that the path I would follow would be through storytelling, whether that was film or theater. I studied theater in college, gotten a master's in fine art and film, and started working for a Hollywood studio.

Then, the internet came along, I realized that might be the foundation of future storytelling. I started moving away from film, and into the internet, the dawn of the internet. It was a fascinating time to be working there. I started working with food, and beverage brands helping them communicate their messages, consumer marketing on the internet. That was my first exposure to food in the context of technology. That was my foundation. From there, when the first dotcom bubble burst, I had an opportunity to meditate on what really mattered to me. I realized that I wanted to be doing something that had more impact, more substantial benefit for the world, and a more enduring impact.

I really was looking for what that would be, I ended up founding LeanPath at that time. That was really a bit of luck that I learned about the food waste problem. Initially, it was really an economic problem in my mind, that people were wasting money. I had never appreciated waste, and had always really bothered me, anything that was inefficient, and wasteful just got under my skin. The idea that we were throwing away food, immediately made intuitive sense to me as a problem that needed to be solved. Then, when I learned that, at that time, food prices at a wholesale level were growing faster than menu prices, I realized that foodservice operators were in the middle of a squeeze where they were having their margins damaged, and food waste was a great way to fix that.

I said, "Gosh, this seems like an area that really needs to be worked on. That is huge, scale, and that could have significant benefits for people." It was more of an economic impact that I was working on at that point than environmental or social, which came later. We initially understood it as an economic opportunity. We also recognize that kitchens were really factories, they were producing food, essentially manufacturing it, but they weren't managed like factories, they weren't benefiting from all the management science that worked so well in automobile production, or really any other formal manufacturing environment, things like Lean process improvement, and Six Sigma.

We said, "What if we could take those principles of management science, and bring those in to kitchens in a lightweight manner, might we be able to significantly reduce food waste." We really took the understanding of the economic problem plus the understanding of this opportunity for a new intervention, and that led us to this approach which began with measurement, that when you measure things, you can begin to change them, when you can measure things, you can begin to improve them. We started to move down that path, it was a tough go frankly, at the beginning. I think it wasn't entirely intuitive to people as to how measuring today's waste would reduce tomorrow's waste.

We really had to help people understand how that loop worked, how data-driven discovery drove process improvement, and how in based problem-solving at the frontline, led to enduring improvement over time. We worked on that, but it was still tough, it was still a very new concept. In food, new concepts take quite a while to break through, in my experience. It was only somewhat into the process that we started to realize that people needed to have a broader understanding of food waste, what it meant, and why it was important. We started doing a lot of educational work on that, speaking at conferences, and writing about it.

It was through that work of educating others that I actually became much more tuned into the environmental and social consequences of food waste which had not been front and center in my thinking at the beginning. It was through telling that story to others about why this mattered, that I ended up digging deep in my research. It was like this aha moment when I became aware that I was holding on to this high voltage line. I was working on one of the most important problems of our time, environmentally and socially, and I had been viewing it just as an economic problem. That moment, when that hit me, I realized that regardless of how difficult this journey was, it was a journey that we needed to take, and we were going to do it. We dug in, and 16 years later, here we are. 

[00:06:10] Liz: That's amazing. You were so ahead of your time, really. 

[00:06:16] Andrew: We were early. It's interesting, whether that's good or bad. I joke that the first eight years of LeanPath, the name of the company describes its history. It was a lean path. On one hand, that was tough, and the market wasn't ready for it, truly. On the other hand, that eight-year period was such a laboratory for us to learn. We were able to work with customers and they taught us about the realities of their daily life running foodservice operations and things that, frankly, I did not have experience with beforehand.

I did most all of our training for the first, probably, 10 years of our company, did almost every implementation, so I was in kitchens all the time. Those were two-way learning experiences. That beginning period, was a time for understanding and matching what these frontline operators needed to be able to make food waste prevention a reality. I'm really grateful for the chance to have had that time to learn, iterate, and evolve our product. At the same time, we were impatient and would have loved for it to take hold sooner. On the other hand, the last eight years have been really the opposite. Of course, we've continued to learn and adapt, but the market has really come to understand food waste as a significant issue and that's been tremendously exciting.

[00:07:49] Liz: That is exciting. I've heard you speak before and you've described food waste really as a nexus issue. What do you mean by that?

[00:07:58] Andrew: Yes, it is a nexus issue. When you started to talk about sustainability, say 15 years ago, people always talked about it in terms of, "There's energy issues around sustainability," and, "There are water issues. There are waste issues and there are sustainable sourcing issues." People had these segmented strategies. Of course, all of those things do indeed matter, but when you start looking at food waste, you realize it works on almost everything. Because, from a climate point of view, eight percent of greenhouse gas emissions are coming from the whole process by which we're growing food that we waste and the disposal of that food. That's a huge issue.

When you look at 25% of our freshwater going into growing food that we waste, so it's a water issue. When you look at two or more percent of our oil consumption going into farm inputs to create food that we waste, it's an energy issue. When you look at the amount of energy that goes into refrigeration in the cold chain, or in production, it's an energy issue. You start looking at this, you go, "This isn't just a waste issue. This is energy, water, waste." Then, of course, it's also a sourcing issue, because this is a market and we are effectively wasting a third of the food we produce. That's having profound consequences for how we produce, where products are sourced and sent.

It's an issue that when you're working on it, it is a nexus. When you are working on food waste, you're working on most everything that has to do with sustainability and, very directly, impacting climate change. For me, it's a leveraged impact. That's the thing that excites me so much, and what I try to help people understand because there are very few times where you get to pull the lever once and get six, eight, or 10 outcomes. The gear ratio on that is fabulous, so I think it's appropriately become one of the top priorities that we see people working on.

[00:09:58] Liz: Definitely. I want to talk more about that and sustainability as a whole, but before we do, the pandemic, obviously, is top of mind and it's really highlighted issues with the food system as a whole. How has it affected your work and your business?

[00:10:15] Andrew: First of all, I think you're entirely right that we need to be thinking about the pandemic. There's so many impacts from it, but there are food system elements of it and that starts at a very, very macro level. Just looking at the amount of land use problem we have where we're encroaching on previously forested or, otherwise, unfarmed lands, and we're getting closer and closer to these natural boundaries, and bringing ourselves into closer connection with these reservoirs of viruses that are in animal populations. Just at the most macro level, we've got to fix our food system as part of addressing exposure to viruses, but I think more specifically, in how has COVID impacted our world.

Number one, we've seen massive amounts of food waste at the beginning of the pandemic. People shut down abruptly and threw out a huge amount of product. They did try to donate it, but not everyone was successful in donating it, and the things that they were donating, were not necessarily the things that were needed at that instant. Then, we saw that the whole foodservice supply chain became problematic, because the supply chain for food retail and foodservice, they're very different, those two supply chains, and you couldn't just redirect supply from the foodservice channel into food retail. People were throwing away milk and plowing under crops. It was really distressing at the onset to see that impact.

Then, from a foodservice operator perspective, so many shut down. Really, the whole industry was immobilized. Some were able to operate from a take-out and delivery perspective, but the volumes have been down dramatically. What you've seen this year has been a lot of food waste, huge economic impact in the sector, and then, at the broader population level, you've seen food insecurity really exposed. With the economic downturn, you're seeing people who are vulnerable, who are being pushed into a situation where they have inadequate access to food, and you're seeing demand on food banks rise dramatically.

This issue has cascaded through our food system with very real consequences for people who need to eat, obviously, and are having trouble with that, as well as all the way up through the production cycle, where there's been huge disruption and loss. The pandemic has, hopefully, shaken us in a way that it's going to drive greater awareness and consciousness of the, frankly, vulnerability or lack of resilience in parts of our food system and things that we need to improve. We're watching that play out at the accelerated turbo speed right in front of our eyes this year.

[00:13:11] Liz: I bet. I know it's the COVID world right now, so it's hard to say anything about benchmarks, but even prior to this, you've been working in the world of food waste for a long time. Do you think progress has been made in the prevention stage? Think pre-COVID, I guess.

[00:13:34] Andrew: Yes. Everything is pre-COVID and post-COVID now, I think, in how we think about data, about food waste, about everything, but specifically to your question about progress on food waste. Certainly, we were making progress on food waste before COVID. Now, that doesn't mean that that progress was happening evenly across the industry. I think you saw the markets that were more mission-driven, so colleges, healthcare, some corporate dining operations that had more sustainability focus, were making a lot of progress on food waste.

I'm not as convinced that the broader restaurant marketplace was making that progress, or that food retail was making that progress, or certainly in the home that we were making progress, but I think we were starting to get some important traction. That's encouraging and when you're trying to move the needle on a problem that's this big and this systemic, it's not going to happen instantaneously. I was in no way dissatisfied with the progress we were making and it was an important beginning. I was, of course, concerned about speeding up that progress because we're trying to hit a UN Sustainable Development Goal 12.3 by 2030, cutting the world's food waste in half. There is a huge amount that has to be done between now and there to make that happen.

That was the state of the world in my mind pre-COVID. That good progress, good traction was happening, a lot of good focus from operators and, frankly, you saw governments leading as well. You saw more attention from senior leaders, you saw more regulation, most of it, I thought, pretty productive regulation, driving attention to the problem. Post-COVID I think, appropriately, people have needed to focus up, first and foremost, on surviving a massive disruption and dislocation. The immediate attention has gone to health and safety. That was a thing that one would expect, reasonably, at the beginning.

I think it's really critical that people recognize the only solutions we have long term to the climate change challenge we're facing, and frankly, to long-term food security, and to addressing some of these issues that are underlying the pandemic. The only solution is to really address this in a structural way, and that means sustainability is more important than ever, not less. This is not icing on the cake. You have got to be reopening with a focus on how you reopen a different business, a business that's responsible, accountable, and ready to do the right things to help our world move forward. Fortunately, we're actually seeing that generally be acknowledged.

One of my great worries, Liz, was that people were going to say sustainability doesn't matter anymore after the pandemic began. I just knew that would be such the wrong response, but I was worried that that's what was going to happen and, really, it hasn't. What you're seeing is that people are recognizing this does need to be part of their reopening, that this is not something that you throw away. In fact, even if you look at it just from Wall Street, the performance of stocks that are rated well on ESG criteria has done very, very well on the flow of capital into ESG related funds, and interest in sustainability metrics has risen. There's actually been, in my mind, an enlightened response to recognize that we've got to do things differently in the future than we did them in the past to be more resilient.

I think we will get back on track with food waste prevention, and I think we're going to get back on track in addressing, at least from the foodservice side of things, to work on food waste. My hope is that that consciousness will emanate more broadly. Time will tell. As far as the actual waste levels in food service, they've been, of course, down because operations have been closed, but that is a false victory. In the same way, we saw that carbon emissions were down during the pandemic because no one was traveling and everyone was immobilized. That's not a long term sustainable posture, so those aren't really gains. They are momentary disruptions. As things come back, it needs to come back in a more efficient and sustainable way.

[00:18:30] Liz: You're right. You're also right you've seeing it on Wall Street, and a lot of companies are prioritizing sustainability and ESG. Even in the waste and recycling industry, all of the public companies, even though, we always say they were the first environmentalist, they are even looking at their own efforts to make sure that it is measurable, and it does meet the criteria, or at least talk about the criteria changing to meet what they're actually doing and not being measured in the same way that a lot of other companies are because they're just in a very different business. I think your optimism is fabulous. We talked about before we started recording, it is a silver lining. 

[00:19:20] Andrew: Yes. I think we have to be optimists because I just believe that's the right way to approach life. I do believe we can drive change. If you look at the long arc of history, improvement happens. At the same time, we have to be realists to the brutal facts of the present reality and the challenges we faced, we can't paper over them. We have a lot of transformation that we have to go through, but I'm confident that we'll get there. I am worried that the clock on climate change is ticking. I'm not worried that that's happening. I know that's happening. I'm worried that our response to it is not nearly urgent and fast enough. It's disquieting.

Every week you read in the newspaper about ice melting and things accelerating at a rate that scientists didn't expect. It's just deeply concerning. My hope is that each of us recognize we have to pick up the pace on this.

To your earlier point about the waste industry, I think we have such an opportunity in this industry to lead. When you think about the whole idea of waste as a resource, reframing it in the context of a circular economy, and recognizing that we have the proximity to these material flows and understand them, understand the challenges related to them, but also the opportunities, this industry has a chance to just be a massive part of the change-making. To be sitting there with those opportunities in front of us is, I hope, pretty exciting for our industry.

[00:20:57] Liz: It definitely is and I think we're embracing it. Everyone realizes that climate change is real, and that we're making big strides, everyone needs to work together. I think you're right, this industry can certainly lead it.

[00:21:14] Andrew: I could go on for hours on climate change. My point is this is a time of opportunity to be innovative, everyone's been challenged to reflect on what we're doing, and how we're doing it. I know at LeanPath, certainly, we've been reflecting on that. I hope that everyone in this industry is doing that because this is a chance to reinvent, and come out of this with some fresh direction that, hopefully, will help us make significant progress on addressing waste, and addressing climate.

[00:21:54] Liz: Definitely. Are you seeing more companies and people using food waste as a feedstock? I feel like I'm seeing more of it, but figured you would have a real bird's eye view of it.

[00:22:05] Andrew: I'm seeing a couple of things. One, I'm seeing that there is a lot of interest in upcycling. Particularly, at the ingredient level, which is really exciting to see that product that would have been thrown away from, brewing beer being turned into ingredients for snacks, or effectively things that would have become siloed on fields being dehydrated and turned into snack ingredients. There's dozens, if not hundreds of examples of the products that are upcycling, we're seeing that. I see that as a significant change in how things are going, but that's upstream.

Downstream, of course, we've got composting, and we've got anaerobic digestion, both of those seem to have continued enduring interest in recognizing the ability to produce energy, or produce compost from these organic streams. Is always important because even if we are very successful at food waste prevention, there is going to be organic waste. We have an opportunity to take those organics and do something responsible with them. I see all of that happening. Most of our clients at LeanPath are generally involved in composting of some sort, or at least redirecting to, if not to compost them to biogas. I don't think there are many who are just sending food waste to landfill anymore.

Keep in mind, many of our client partners are on the progressive edge of this process. I'm not just confused and believing that that's universal. Obviously, a lot of food is still going to landfill, and it's a real shame because that wasted food, first of all, if it's edible excess, it should be feeding people. If not, then there's a chance to feed it to animals following the EPA hierarchy. From there, you've got the ability to produce energy from their soil. If we're not doing those things, we're just missing such huge opportunity.

[00:24:22] Liz: Big time. I know your solution, LeanPath has evolved over the years, I read about a tracker that just launched called Scout. Can you talk about those two things, one being how the solution has evolved over the past almost two decades? Then, talk a little bit about Scout?

[00:24:42] Andrew: Yes. It's funny to think it's been almost two decades, Liz. I've been thinking 16 years, but you're right, I guess we're getting there. We have been through multiple iterations of this. The core concept has remained the same, which is we're measuring wasted food, and we're trying to make that as easy and quick as possible for foodservice operators because they are busy, and they've got a lot going on. We want to capture this information in a really expedient way. The big shift, of course, for us is we followed all the technology trends into network, IoT devices, into Cloud-based services.

When we began, smartphones didn't exist. We've taken advantage of all of those technology curves over time, and now have a very modern solution that recently we realized needed to change in a couple of ways. Not change, but we needed to add to our product line. One way was that we wanted to have a solution that was a little bit lighter weight, and more affordable because we could serve high volume operations really well, they could get great return on investment on a deployment of our systems, but if you had a smaller operation, it was a tougher call for you to figure out, "Could you get the ROI from an investment in our equipment?" We wanted to bring the cost of that down and, therefore, make it more accessible to everyone.

We also recognize that some of our existing clients were tracking some but not all of their food waste. They were making choices like a college would track in their largest dining halls, but maybe not in a coffee shop. We wanted to create options for them to be able to go and really cover the full food waste terrain because we know it's all actionable and we don't want to have pockets of stuff that's not being measured because if it's not measured, we know it's not managed.

That was the inspiration for this product we recently released, which is called LeanPath Scout, which is this lighter weight more affordable solution. We're just excited to see more people have access to this and in introducing that. The other major change was, due to COVID, we recognize that so many foodservice operators were going from buffets to grab and go. You may have read the buffet is dead, I think I've seen that thing written 1,000 times in the last six months. I actually don't believe the buffet is dead, I think there's a reason that the buffet has lived for so long, endured and that people like it. I think it will come back in a safe way.

First, it's coming back with curated buffets with staff serving food, I think eventually we'll see our way back to some version of buffets as we knew it in the past. In the meantime, everyone is serving a lot of grab and go, and salads, and sandwiches, and items composed into these boxes. They needed to be able to track waste based more on each than weight. LeanPath Scout is a solution to do exactly that. Between those two changes in the last few months, what we're hoping to do is help people track in this new environment their food waste, recognizing that their flows and methods have changed some. Secondly, reach those lower volume operations.

There's one other twist that's interesting to this, also, Liz, which is that even the high-volume operations of six or eight months ago, or nine months ago, today are medium to low volume operations because their capacity constraints. If you look at colleges with limited students on campus, or hospitals with very limited or zero visitor dining, or you look at corporate offices where people are working from home, or you looking at hotels that have no group and convention business going and are working mainly with leisure travelers, everybody's volume is down significantly. Being able to help them measure at that lower volume level is important.

Those are some of the things that we've been changing in terms of helping the market. I would say just in general, our push has been, "Make it easy, make it fast." The other part of it, though, has been, "Don't just pay attention to the tracking, pay attention to the people, make sure that we're bringing behavioral science principles into everything we're doing, and that once we've got the data, that we help people learn how to use that data to drive change."

So much of our innovation has been behind the scenes in software, in the cloud, really providing guidance to our customers in ways they can use that data to drive change. Those are some of the things that we've been working on. It's a constant menu of innovation. The biggest frustration for me is we always have about 300 ideas on the list and it's hard to pick just the few that we're going to do. We're going to keep innovating and responding to the market, which certainly is changing.

[00:29:53] Liz: I bet. I love your journey so far from [laughs] not even having smartphones to now being able to help the small retailers with the Scout, that's awesome.

[00:30:05] Andrew: Yes, it's amazing to me. When I think about the way we move data around at the beginning, our very first prototype, we move data on something that was called an eye button, which was like a little round silver disc that looked like a Panasonic camera battery. That was state of the art embedded systems data transfer. To think since then we've been through the USB drive as the state of the art and all the way to the point now where we just have ubiquitous network access all the time for everything, it's amazing.

[00:30:43] Liz: That is amazing. The data you must have collected over the past 16 years, what kind of trends are you seeing? Again, it's a pre-COVID during post-COVID world, but you must be able to draw a lot from the data that you've seen.

[00:31:01] Andrew: Well, we can, and we have a lot of data. A few things that we've seen that I think are interesting for this time, specifically. One of our key ratios at LeanPath is something called a food efficiency ratio, which is the percentage of the food that you buy that you waste. If you're buying, let's say, $10,000 in food and you waste $1,000 of that, you would have a 10% food efficiency ratio. We shorten that to call it the FER, so we track FER and that's generally when we start working with a client partner, we're looking at what's your FER and then we're looking at how does that change as you work on this problem.

There's a dynamic, which is that as you get into lower volumes, typically the FERs rise. When you have high volume, you have more ability to rework items, reutilize them, serve them tomorrow if they're leftover from today, but as the volumes get lower, and lower, your maneuverability is reduced. You can't react as well; you have fewer options to react. One of the things that has been interesting is people say, "Well, hey, since volumes are down, food waste must be down." Overall, yes, food waste is going to be down if you're operating at 10% of capacity, but on a relative basis, your food waste is likely to be up because you're likely to be less efficient on the food that you are producing.

I think that's something that people need to realize, that it's not like you stay at the same level of efficiency as things start to drop. I really want to drive that consciousness around the industry because it's a bit counterintuitive, I think, or at least if you're not paying attention to that specific thought you might not think it. The other big trends, and that's a very relevant for COVID because volumes are down, but generally we continue to see that there are a lot of wasted vegetables, and people often worry more about what they call the center of the plate. Your proteins, your meats, and chefs usually are paying close attention to that because it's so expensive, it's usually not the thing they waste the most.

Then there are these things that people think of is less expensive, whether it's vegetables or its starches, sides, hot oatmeal in the morning is a classic example, it doesn't cost much but people waste a ridiculous amount of it. Those trends we have continued to see over time, that those are often some of the top wasted items. The composition of the waste, I would say, we haven't seen like dramatic shifts in that, but there's big opportunity there. Particularly as people are talking about more plant-forward diets, the idea that we're wasting vegetables is one of our number one items. There's going to be a way to connect those dots and both waste fewer vegetables and drive a more plant-forward diet or menu I should say.

That's on the food types. Then the other trend I guess would be on loss reasons and why people throw things away, and that's still pretty consistently over half of what's discarded is due to overproduction, it's simply people make too much. In trying to match supply and demand, they end up with too much supply. That's a function of not knowing how many people are going to show up, and what they're going to eat, and not wanting to run out and all of the psychological concerns that come along with being in the hospitality world. No one goes into this business wanting to run out of food and disappoint people. There's a really strong desire to have enough.

I think you and I probably both feel this just if we have someone over for dinner, it would be horrifying to have a dinner guest and run out of food. Imagine that being your job every day. There's a bias to make sure you don't run out, and yet that very bias is often compounded by multiple people having that bias in an operation and that adding up to extensive overproduction. That's usually the biggest opportunity's own. Trim waste, of course, is another one, but that one is less actionable actually than overproduction, just because if you're going to trim watermelon you're going to have some rinds left and you're probably not going to be able to put that rinds to work in your menu fully.

Some of those things are less actionable. We tend to see, overall, trend-wise, those are the sort of major menu trends and last reason trends that we see. It hasn't changed a ton. I think mainly for this point in time is just to be aware of that efficiency decline that happens with volume decline.

[00:35:58] Liz: Definitely. I noticed that LeanPath is now a B Corp. I know that's no easy task. How important was that to you?

[00:36:07] Andrew: It was really important to me because it allowed us to do a couple of things. One, we've always sort of operated with the principles that underlie B Corp. If you look at our business, what we do, our mission, how we've run this business has always been in line with that, but I recognize that over time businesses change, and if you want to make sure that those values are really baked into the business, you want to have a formal structure like a B Corp.

By doing that it's built into our articles of incorporation, it's built into how our governance works, and it's going to be enduring. That's, I think, one of the benefits of a B Corp is. Not just getting to that practice, which largely I think we were already there, but ensuring that that practice is sustained over time. I think the other thing is just helping people outside our company understand that those are our values. One of the things that is tough about being a for-profit company is that people often assume that your only motive is profit, that's the only thing that you can't think past that and that all you're focused on is selling. For us, it's always been a balanced equation. By having the B Corp, it really allows us to express that to people so they understand that we're not just here to make money.

Obviously, that's one of our priorities but that's not our single focus. Be the B Corp ensures that we institutionalize those values and communicate them clearly. Frankly, our team is super excited about it too because it allows them to be able to explain to other people whether it's their families or folks that they're explaining what they do, it just allows them to explain that this is really a value-driven pursuit that we're all connected to, and I'm just so proud of this team. As you would imagine, during COVID, there's stresses and strains on everybody and no different for our team, and they've just doubled down very, very deeply committed to our mission, and it's neat to see.

[00:38:34] Liz: Well, congratulations, that's awesome. I'd love to see that. Also, I think it's just so fascinating that you entered into this thing, pre-LeanPath knowing the economics behind food waste and then the stainability piece and the social good piece came from that. Because often it's the opposite, where someone is driven by the other elements.

I just love how you approach it from a business perspective because I think that makes stakeholders sit up and listen a lot, and I'm sure when you were first watching this and trying to get clients that they really sat up and listened when you talked about the black and white of the numbers of their food waste game. Profits, labor, the food itself. Can you talk a little bit about how you made that clear for people and made it concrete?

[00:39:30] Andrew: Yes. I think that, first of all, if you want anyone to change anything, you've got to make sure that they understand you have their best interests at heart and that you really understand them. If you show up and say, "I want you to change but I don't understand you", no one is going to follow you on that change path, that would be a very dangerous thing. It all starts first with understanding their context. From my point of view, you've got to run a business first and foremost. If your business isn't running properly, you're not going to be able to continue running that business.

I come at this from a very pragmatic point of view that we have to change businesses from the inside out in ways that makes sense. There are others who come from the outside in who are more activists and sort of demand change. Certainly, they're a critical part of the ecosystem and sometimes can be helpful in driving change internally, but our role was to be a pragmatic partner to our clients looking at this as a business issue first and recognizing where's the operational excellence opportunity, where's the food productivity opportunity, how can we save gross margin. Because this is a no brainer. Not putting food in the garbage is not putting money in the garbage, this is not complicated.

If you're spending hundreds of millions of dollars a year on food or billions of dollars a year on food, if you're a big food company, that's just straightforward. I recognized that was a place to be able to get sponsorship and people willing to spend money to do the work, so it was pragmatic for us, it was pragmatic for them, we understood them, we didn't ask them to do something that was in any way counter to their interest.

But then you end up getting this sort of combination effect. We talked earlier today about the nexus of food waste on all these environmental issues, it's also of course a nexus with financial issues. As you start working on this you say, "Hey, did you also know that all of these other benefits are associated with this?" When people realize that, there's no downside, there is only upside. That's how we approached it. I also think it's important to recognize that there are a lot of people competing to help folks find efficiency and save money, there's always someone at your door if you're a big company saying, "We can save you money", so the question is where do you put your focus.

The sustainability professionals have always been real terrific advocates for food waste because they recognize it's one of those triple bottom line opportunities. Many times, if we haven't been able to get to operational excellence people directly, sustainability leaders will walk us in the door and say, "Hey", to their colleagues, this is an opportunity to save money but it's also one that we really care about from a sustainability point of view. There's a natural kind of synergy or complimentary element there between those different parts of these large businesses.

I would say also, understanding people isn't just at the business level, is also at the chef level and the frontline kitchen level that you've got to recognize that you meet people where they are and you have to empathize with their challenges. Coming into a kitchen and asking them to measure food waste every day, the first thing you get is some resistance. Often, chefs say, "I don't have any food waste" and, of course, I used to believe that, Liz, I don't anymore, but I used to say, "Oh, good job, you don't have any waste. Excellent." Having heard that enough and looked in their garbage cans and seeing that there's a lot of food waste, I recognize that that's actually, in some ways, a defense, people are worried they're going to get in trouble for wasting food and they're either defensive about it or they're blind to it and just not aware.

You've got to meet them in their world where they're dealing with an immense pressure, they have the ability to get fired three times a day, breakfast, lunch, and dinner, each of those are big dramatic moments of performance where it has to be there. Meet them in that place of urgency and recognize that you've got to deliver a solution that is practical for them it's got to be simple and easy, and it's got to, frankly, reflect positively on them, not negatively.

It can't be something where people get in trouble, you've got to recognize that everybody has food waste and the best operations are the ones that measure it and manage it transparently. All of those, if you will, aspects of empathy, I think have been core bedrock to LeanPath business. If you don't bring that empathy, whether it's at the corporate level to needing them for to make good business sense or at the chef level to not look like you're doing a bad job and do the right thing, all the way to the very frontline person who's not going to get in trouble for measuring something they burned. You've got to create an ecosystem where it's safe to talk about food waste and work on it.

[00:44:39] Liz: That's great advice. Also, empathy and everything, especially nowadays. I think we can't lose if we apply more of that everywhere.

[00:44:48] Andrew: I agree.

[00:44:49] Liz: I know sustainability is a big part of your mission now, and it sounds personally and professionally. Like we talked about how COVID has really put a light on it, do you feel we're going to make progress? I know you're nervous about where things are headed and the tick-tock of the climate change clock. Are you seeing some things that are making you optimistic that we're going to make these changes?

[00:45:12] Andrew: As we talked about earlier, I am an optimist and I think we are seeing some positive indications. The fact that the capital is flowing the ESG, that is ESG companies, is a great starting point. The fact that people have not used COVID as a moment to recall sustainability as fact and throw it out the window, that's terrific. I've seen with some of our clients, for example, we work with Sytecso, a very large food service company, and they've put out press releases describing their financial challenges with COVID, and in the very same press release reiterated all their sustainability commitments, starting with their work on food waste.

People recognizing that these are linked concepts brings me great optimism, I think that we have a lot of work to do. The areas that cause me, I guess, concern just to be realistic about the path we have to navigate here. Number one, we need to be focused more on prevention, it's the where we get the biggest benefit and it's still the reality that people focus on things they can see rather than things they can't see. That's the tangible process of whether it's throwing something in the compost or into the garbage and sort of dealing with that part of the equation.

I'm, of course, a huge proponent of composting and biogas, and inorganic recycling, there are reasons we have all these systems, but we've got to pair this with this understanding that we have circular opportunities. We've got to move upstream to prevention and pay more attention to that. Then the materials in our hands need to be sent to their highest and best use. We have to start to think about this in a more differentiated way.

My dream is the moment where we're actually running auctions on the loading dock for the food waste, where someone's like, "Hey, mine has happened to have a lot of higher content of fats, oils, and greases in this time based on our menu, and it's going to have higher energy production and hopefully someone will bid more for that than one that's awful of celery stocks, which might be more valuable in compost." I think we've got to get to the point where that circular thinking is more present, and we're starting to look at how we monetize these waste streams because if we can monetize it, then we can drive the behavior.

In the same way we spoke a moment ago about finding the business benefit in something, if we can start to put dollars and cents on these waste stocks, I think currently waste that should be viewed as feedstocks, we will have opportunity there. Prevention is important, circular thinking is important in my mind. I'd like to see more of those things. I think we still have a huge measurement gap that we're trying to cross over where we're still working with really pretty blunt data on waste overall, and still on food waste where we have really big numbers based on surveys, and garbage sorts, and dumpster diving sorts of activities.

We still don't understand this problem in as much detail as we should, we need to be instrumenting it more. Of course, I have a vested interest in that and what we do at LeanPath, but we're deeply passionate about it because we know that that measurement drives change. I think more focus on measurement, more focused on prevention, clearly, more focused on circularity and monetization are all things that are ahead of us.

If we do those things, I think we're going to make progress. We've got to pick up to pace. If I had one, I guess, big ask of the universe, it would be for people to stop having a incremental approach to change. Everybody always wants to test in one place, and see if something works and put a toe in the water, scale things up slowly or partially. This is not a time for half measures, this is a time to be bold, this is a time to find things that work and do them. I hope that our industry will find that courage.

[00:49:21] Liz: I hope that too. I think that's a great ask, and not that big now, right? We're in that place where it needs to happen. I love that.

[00:49:28] Andrew: Definitely.

[00:49:29] Liz: Before I let you go, what's next for you and for LeanPath?

[00:49:33] Andrew: Well, that's a good question. We're constantly listening and changing. In this environment, for perhaps the first time in 16 years, I feel like any strategic plan that's more than a couple months in the future is going to be wrong because the world is changing, so we're just listening very carefully day to day. I think generally, where are we heading, you're going to see more artificial intelligence in our technologies, whether that's auto-classification of food waste via machine vision or more prescriptive analytics in terms of guiding behaviors. Those things are in front of us. That's on the kind of the technology side.

We're going to be looking at how can we continue to get more people doing prevention and measurement. Our mission at LeanPath is to make food waste prevention and measurement everyday practice in the world kitchens, and everyday practice is a big lift and the world kitchens is a big lift. What's next for us is how do we take what we know works and make it available to as many people as possible so that at some point in the hopefully not too distant future, when you walk into a kitchen measuring food waste is just how it's done, they all do it in the same way. Everybody washes their hands and preps food in a consistent way, and stores it in a refrigerator in a consistent way. Food waste measurements just going to be standard practice, that's what we're shooting for. That's why you see us continuing to innovate, not just with new functionality on the innovation side, but also accessibility.

[00:51:24] Liz: That's great. I can't wait to watch and see what else happens, you guys are doing great work. I love watching your journey.

[00:51:30] Andrew: Well, thank you, Liz. We're enjoying it and we appreciate the support of this broader ecosystem. This is never work you do alone whether it's our client partners and their frontline teams, it's non-governmental organizations, they're advocating for food waste, it's industry associations. This is just a big lift and it's exciting to see how many people are working hard on it. Look, if we keep up the momentum we have now, we will make a big, big debt. I'm excited about that.

[00:52:04] Liz: Good, me too. I think we will make that big then. This has been great, thank you so much, Andrew. I love this conversation. Like I said, appreciate the work you're doing. Continue to do this to combat food waste and climate change.

[00:52:18] Andrew: Thank you, Liz. Thanks for having me.  

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