Digging in the trash

“Could you imagine finishing the day and not counting your cash from your cash registers?” Andrew Shakman likes to ask customers. We don’t count how much food we throw away, he adds. And that’s money too.

Shakman is CEO of LeanPath Inc., a company that tracks food waste for large-scale food service providers: hospitals, universities and corporate cafeterias. The ValuWaste system doesn’t deal with leftovers and plate scrapings. It focuses on pre-consumer food waste generated by kitchen systems for ordering, preparing and serving food.

ValuWaste provides customers with a scale and touchscreen kiosks. Before throwing out food, employees must weigh the food scraps and identify what kind of waste it is to the system. Once a week, managers download data into a program that looks at how much the waste weighed, and why it was discarded. LeanPath then helps companies develop a waste action team to identify efficiencies.

The company launched its ValuWaste system in June, after successful trials with a handful of companies. Aramark (NYSE: RMK) tested the system at six of its cafeterias, including Deaconess Medical Center in Spokane, Wash.