This fall, North American foodservice company Guckenheimer announced it had achieved a 64 percent reduction in food waste from a 2022 baseline, making it the first major U.S. foodservice provider to cut food waste in half. The achievement exceeds the company’s goal of reducing food waste 50 percent by the end of 2024, and supports its commitment as a signatory of the U.S. Food Waste Pact, which it joined earlier this year. It’s also a significant step toward helping its parent company, ISS, to accomplish its pledge to halve global food waste by 2027. To learn more about how Guckenheimer accomplished this impressive feat, we caught up with Joseph Mullings, Director of Programs for Food Sustainability & Social Impact.

The following has been edited for clarity and brevity.

How did you convince company leadership to get behind your food waste goals?

I couldn’t take the credit for that. We’re part of a global business that grasped, all the way back in 2018, that the scale of our spending on food meant that we had to lock in a sustainability target, with key performance indicators, that made us responsible global citizens. The research is clear—reducing food loss and waste is one of the largest climate solutions across all sectors—not just in the food system. By taking action, we understood the positive impacts that we could have on land, water, and biodiversity while also improving food availability and food security worldwide.

It was to the credit of our leadership in the U.S. that we were convinced that we could, with the support of Winnow, hit that 50% target ahead of ISS’s global goal of 2027. There are no losers in food waste reduction. It saves the planet, it saves on costs, and it’s just the right thing to do.

In addition to technology, what strategies have you used to reduce food waste in operations?

We are a culinary-led organization. Our CEO, Paul Fairhead, is a former chef, and he will tell you that there are at least two things you’ll find in the best kitchens—competition and creativity. Starting out by setting an exceptional goal and creating a buzz about being the best globally was essential. Producing data by region to demonstrate what “good, better, and best” looked like helped to drive healthy competition. No chef or manager wants to see good food go to waste. We witnessed an innate interest in measuring leftover food that could not be donated and creativity in finding ways to continue to reduce food waste.

It was really exciting to see chef innovations bubble up to the surface, providing us with new recipes for repurposing leftovers and a range of zero waste initiatives. Essentially, we successfully created a culture driven by competitive and creative leaders who would drive pilots for menu engineering, portion control, and special campaigns around Climate Week, World Food Day, or the International Day of Awareness for Food Loss & Waste. In a few weeks’ time, we should also see the release of our first Zero Waste Cookbook!

Did you encounter any challenges in reducing food waste, and if so, how were they resolved?

The challenges are numerous and ever-present! Reducing food waste requires new resources from a training, technology, and people perspective, and each of these aspects requires refreshes, updates, or periodic upgrades. Grasping how to resource this work for success is a challenge we had to tackle from both a Guckenheimer and client investment perspective.

We found the greatest success in resolving the array of challenges has come, first, through a strong partnership with our software and technology partners. Collaborating with Winnow to identify and address red flags in the system, implement best practices from a catalog of lessons learned, and share feedback to make our processes as lean as possible has been crucial. It’s clear to us now that at our sites where we have strong culinary leadership and management, consistent onboarding processes, and easy access to training, we have the best performance in food waste reduction.

How did using Winnow influence behavior change in the kitchen?

“What gets measured, gets managed.” It is easier to organize the things you can visualize. Our best performing sites turn data into intelligence. The greater our ability to connect waste to actual meals prepared has proven to make chefs less wasteful. Taking Winnow data to enable storytelling has been invaluable. From demonstrating the actual impacts of food waste on the environment, to demonstrating how the cost of food waste over time equates to ‘x’-percentage of the current wage bill, these conversations have sparked impactful dialogue which we have seen inspire greater commitment to best practices.

In addition to helping the environment, have you realized any economic benefits from reducing food waste?

Saving close to one million meals each year allows us to enhance our focus on the food and experience we give to our clients and their people. Any savings achieved is our client's money and is realized in their business. Generating the savings that we do allows us, on our best performing accounts, to deliver more of the types of flourishes that keep our clients engaged and our programs socially impactful.

Now that you have reduced food waste by 64%, what’s next?

That’s a bit of a secret right now, but I can tell you that plate waste and catering waste are very high on the agenda. We have spent the better part of 2024 piloting with Winnow and will shortly announce new commitments to drive reductions even further in new areas of the food waste landscape. We will of course be keen to maintain our performance with a stabilized rate of success at somewhere between 2-3%, while ensuring that individual accounts that have not yet hit 50% still work toward this aspiration at a local level.

What advice would you share with other foodservice companies interested in reducing food waste?

Fight to resource this work, so you are able to deliver credible outcomes and reliable data. This is really about the planet, not about the companies we work for, and so it’s only right that we work together to drive the technology and then advocate for the systemwide changes that we know can accelerate the positive impacts of this very important work.

Check out ReFED's recommendations for Foodservice and Restaurants to reduce food waste.