A Forkful of Sustainability
Imagine a meal from your favorite restaurant. Now imagine one-third of it sitting in a truck, heading to a waste facility. This is the reality for most eating establishments. A large quantity of a restaurant’s most ordered food is prepared at the beginning of the day, and the portions that are not sold are wasted.
Thankfully, the University of Wisconsin–Madison (UW) is taking a proactive approach to this problem at its six all-you-care-to-eat Dining Markets, each of which supports thousands of hungry students. All-you-care-to-eat Dining Markets at the UW have seen a rapid reduction in kitchen food waste thanks to cutting-edge technology known as Leanpath. With the joint efforts from students, University Housing Dining and Culinary Services (Dining) staff, and the Green Fund, the university is turning over a new leaf.
The Leanpath system then analyzes this data to produce helpful statistics and assign financial cost and environmental factors to food scraps. These results are easy to read and are automatically shown visually in graphs and charts. For example, the food waste value is totaled daily and compared to previous days. This way, all members of the team can see the shrinking amount of food waste being produced. Through this process, Dining staff can critically evaluate foods that are commonly wasted and are encouraged to make more strategic purchasing decisions.
The pilot project in Rheta’s Market was so successful that it led to a secondary location for Leanpath installation, Four Lakes Market in Dejope Residence Hall. Malorie Garbe, the University Housing Sustainability Coordinator, facilitated the expansion of Leanpath to Four Lakes Market in 2023 and eventually to all six Dining Market locations across the UW campus in November 2024. This exciting development represents a major commitment from Dining to support sustainability efforts, consistent with Dining’s goal to reduce back-of-house food waste by 50% over the next few years.
Members of the Green Fund team who proposed and supported the Leanpath project at Rheta’s Market. Back row, left to right: Travis Blomberg, Emily Johnson, Morgan Barlin. Front row, left to right: Eliza Lindley, Rachel Schumacher, Maya Barwick.
Students Take Action
In 2022, Morgan Barlin and a team of fellow students noticed food waste while eating at the Dining Markets and were inspired to make a difference. Barlin describes her first-hand experience with food waste at the university as, “being involved in the Food Recovery Network (FRN) on campus, I knew the University was open to creative food waste solutions. While FRN recovered excess food and prevented it from going to waste, food recovery didn’t solve the root of the problem. Our dining halls were producing much more food than we needed. Given that the Green Fund supports capital investments, I, along with Travis Blomberg who mentored me along the way, started doing research on food waste reduction technology and found Leanpath.” Barlin applied for a grant through the Green Fund, an Office of Sustainability program designed to support student initiatives that improve the campus’s environmental, social, and economic impact. The Green Fund and its staff are involved from the moment a student realizes they want to make a change and help them develop ways to reach their goals. Together, Dining and Green Fund staff and students were able to rethink the systems that Dining uses to reduce back-of-house food waste. This waste includes food that is thrown away during the stages of preparation, storage, and cooking. The team settled on the Leanpath system. The Green Fund approved a pilot program in February 2022 to incorporate Leanpath into Rheta’s Market, and the project hit the ground running that summer. Dining staff utilize Leanpath to gather data before disposing of each food item. The Leanpath technology tracks the type of food, the food weight, and the reason the food is being discarded.A set of Leanpath instructional posters at Rheta’s Market provides clear guidance to staff on how to log and categorize food waste accurately.
The Leanpath bench scale system at Rheta’s Market allows staff to weigh and record food waste, supporting more sustainable kitchen practices.