Software worth its weight in soup

At Swedish Medical Center's First Hill campus in Seattle, a lot of soup, it turns out, was winding up down the drain. That's what Eric Eisenberg, executive chef at Swedish Medical Center discovered last year thanks to technology supplied by Portland-based LeanPath. Serving soup to thousands of customers each day, Eisenberg knew he was overcooking, but never prioritized finding ways to reduce soup waste.

That’s where LeanPath, creator of ValueWaste, a scale and software system that tracks and calculates the value of pre-consumer food waste, stepped in.

Through a pilot program sponsored by Seattle Public Utilities (SPU), LeanPath installed ValueWaste at Swedish Medical Center’s First Hill campus and at Seattle University . For the past year, kitchen staff there have been stopping on the way to the compost bins at a combination scale and touch screen with any food waste generated in the kitchen, but not served to customers. 

They input the type of food and the container it's in, place it on the scale, and ValueWaste calculates the food's value based on its weight. Later, any staff member can access a wealth of reports to see what recipes generate the most waste so they can look for efficiencies with the highest value.

Within a month, Eisenberg saw how much unserved soup was costing him and changed production methods. He cut costs from soup waste alone by about $800 per week.

Now Swedish is installing ValueWaste at its two other campuses at a cost of nearly $25,000.