Food waste has become a critical global concern over recent years. According to the UN’s latest Food Waste Index Report, 2022 saw over 1 billion tons of food go to waste. 28% — or 290 million tons — of this waste was derived from the food service sector. In the US alone, this amounted to an estimated USD$138 billion in 2022 — necessitating quick and decisive action from the food industry.
Last September, Guckenheimer became the first US food services provider to cut food waste by more than half, achieving a 64% reduction using AI technology from Winnow.
CEO Paul Fairhead was a major proponent of this. A chef by trade, he spent the first 14 years of his career working in the kitchens of hotels, restaurants and other areas in the industry. He has since been with Guckenheimer for almost two decades, running the food service activities across numerous offices in its US branch.
Since joining, Fairhead has helped assemble a team of experienced chefs with one core value: being “food-obsessed”. This, coupled with the global goal of Guckenheimer’s parent company ISS to halve food waste by 2027, played a core role in the team’s mission.
“Being a chef, the raw ingredient is so important in a kitchen,” he tells Sustainable Food Business. “To see it go to waste is heartbreaking in terms of the effort and passion that you’ve put into a dish.”
AI technology drives waste reduction
It began with the implementation of artificial intelligence technology from Winnow, a company dedicated to developing tools to help chefs run more profitable and sustainable kitchens. Fairhead explains the tool in simplistic terms: a camera attached to a trash can on a scale that photographs and analyzes waste.
“We can monitor the waste output at 500 locations nationwide or globally and ask ourselves: ‘What can we do with this?'” Fairhead explains. “We found that a lot of our waste came down to carrot trimmings, salmon skin, potato skins.”
Naturally, what to do with this information became the next step. This, Fairhead says, ultimately came down to the culture at Guckenheimer — that is, the passion and care for food embedded within every chef at the company.
“It has to be something that our culinarians and managers want to do,” says Fairhead. “We had healthy competition between different sites and regions about who was achieving the best outcome. We gave our chefs the license to act and come up with creative solutions, and that gamification was really what helped us get to where we are.”
Chefs repurposed trimmings for events and shared strategies through forums, enabling collaboration across locations. The utilization of Winnow’s AI tool meant that chefs could tap into the ideas and strategies of their counterparts in other states, further boosting their collaborative efforts. This has resulted in more than a few creative outputs, including a Zero Waste Cookbook, which details recipes that utilize ingredients or trimmings that typically go to waste.
Client collaboration and consumer education
Working with Guckenheimer’s many corporate clients was a necessity, as well. “By nature, if you walk into a corporate dining facility, you want there to be a lot of options,” Fairhead notes. “That usually means slowing down the amount of food production before closing a service period, which must be done in partnership with your clients. It’s about finding a balance between providing enough food and minimizing waste.”
Fairhead and his team are now focusing on their next challenge: plate waste reduction. “In an all-you-can-eat situation, people always take more than they need,” he says. “The AI tool shows consumers their food waste weight. We hope these gentle reminders change habits over time.”
For waste that is unavoidable, Guckenheimer has implemented circular solutions. “We look at waste at every avenue, including the mileage it is travelling,” says Fairhead. “We do a lot of landscaping for our clients, so we usually end up using these fertilizers on their campuses.
“In this sense, the food waste doesn’t actually leave the sites once it’s been produced. It is actually reused on the campuses, on our flower beds, or even our chef’s gardens that we’ve been building at a lot of our locations.”
Guckenheimer: Beyond food waste
Guckenheimer’s sustainability efforts extend beyond food waste reduction. The company is systematically transitioning from gas to electric kitchen appliances, reducing carbon emissions while improving indoor air quality.
Single-use plastics reduction represents another key initiative. In communal dining areas traditionally filled with individually wrapped items, Guckenheimer has implemented bulk ordering systems paired with reusable containers.
Then there’s the company’s sustainable sourcing policy that addresses environmental impact and animal welfare throughout its supply chain. In this, Guckenheimer practices “reverse procurement” to intercept potential waste before it occurs.
“We have a set of procurement principles that we stick to,” says Fairhead. “In the US, 100% of our shell eggs are sourced from cage-free hens. We’ve removed palm oil from our supply chain. Our pork is 100% gestation crate-free, as well.”
The company is also transitioning toward plant-forward cuisine. “A lot of chefs perhaps haven’t cooked vegetables in terms of flavor profiles and preparation styles, as most would have been trained to work with animal protein,” explains Fairhead. “So we’ve sent a bunch of our culinarians to training sessions. It really teaches them to shift from cooking a steak, for example, to ensuring the vegetable becomes the king of the plate and everything from there.”
Guckenheimer’s next steps? Ensuring these sustainability practices can be implemented on a global scale.
“We’re working to make sure that the practices we’ve fostered here in the US become a global standard,” he says. “So we’re busy exploring what that takes. In some countries, it’s more difficult to trace where ingredients like eggs might come from. So, we’ve got to work with the industry at large to assure those standards are set, and that we are able to stick to them.”
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