Editor’s Note: While URCI is known for supporting new and growing entrepreneurs, we are equally committed to helping established businesses improve efficiency and increase profits. As we expand our involvement in the regional food system, we emphasize that waste tracking in the food industry is a practical, data-driven way to reduce costs—with the added benefit of lowering environmental impact.
Whether you own a business, help to run a business, or run a facility that includes food, a food waste tracker can be a very useful way to reduce your costs and environmental impact. However, starting one can be a daunting task, when employees are already overtasked, the arithmetic is complicated, the results take time, and it’s not immediately obvious if the results will be useful. To help others to reduce their waste, I have attached this manual on how to begin your own waste tracker.
Contents:
- What are the benefits of a food waste tracker?
- What is needed to produce a food waste tracker?
- How do you create a food waste tracker?
- How to start using a food waste tracker?
- Final thoughts
1) What are the benefits of a Food Waste Tracker?
Food waste tracking is first and foremost a way to gain useful data about your food and how it’s being used. This data allows you to change your menus, proportions, or purchases depending on where your waste comes from. Not only can this reduce your food waste, but it also reduces your environmental impact, dumping costs, and labor spent producing uneaten food. These benefits far outweigh the labor cost of tracking, especially when the tracking is set up properly.
2) What is needed to produce a Food Waste Tracker?
Food waste tracking can be done with nearly any level of equipment or labor, but limited supplies can make the data more accurate or easy to interpret. A scale allows for more accurate measurement, though measurements can be volumetric when this is not possible. Tracking sheets are a necessity, but each facility should have its own customized tracking sheets, and we’ll cover how to make your own in the next section. Overall, the requirements are:
- A Scale (both counter and floor versions are sold on Amazon)
- Tracking sheets (included here) for each waste bin
- Pencils for each waste bin
- Access to a computer with Microsoft Excel software
3) How do you create a Food Waste Tracker?
Before tracking, there are a few things that should be thought about first.
First, what data do you wish to collect? What questions do you need or want answered?
- Do you want to know which meals (breakfast, lunch, dinner) have the most waste?
- Do you want to know which types (protein, grain, etc.) have the most waste?
- Do you want to know which dishes (mashed potatoes, steak, etc.) have the most waste?
These questions inform what will be included on the food waste tracker sheets. Here are a few examples of what they may look like:
Table 1. Example of Restaurant Tracking Sheets
Restaurants are different from other facilities in that they typically have more control of their menu, and would use tracking not only as a means to identify food waste, but to improve menus. This restaurant would be chiefly concerned with which ingredients are wasted in the kitchen, and so their kitchen tracker would track waste by ingredient type. The plate tracker would include the portions served and sample portion weights, in order to determine the amount of each menu item’s waste, and improve their menu.
Table 2. Example 2: Residential Facility Tracking Sheets
Rather than track the number of meals served, a residential facility should track population, as that is the determining factor in how much food is served each day. As residential facilities have much more variation in their menu, more general categories such as protein and grain are needed, rather than specific items.
Table 3. Example 3: School Waste Tracking Sheets
4) How to start using a Food Waste Tracker?
Once you’ve created and printed out paper trackers of your own, you’re ready to begin.
First, place the above sheets somewhere that the waste can easily be written down, usually by waste bins and food processing stations.
At the end of each meal, record the totals of each food type wasted in the kitchen on a tracking sheet, and, if applicable, do the same for plate waste.
Once you have the data for a week, it’s time to input it into Excel so that you can easily analyze it. I won’t lie, this part will seem somewhat complicated, especially when done from scratch.
Luckily, some example sheets are shown in this report; so you’ll have a good place to start. If you have Excel experience – great! This shouldn’t be very difficult for you. If not, feel free to use one of the examples provided. The simplest and best way to track waste, as I’ve found in setting up these spreadsheets for four correctional facilities, two restaurants and a hospital, is to have columns represent waste types, and rows represent individual meals, as shown here:
Table 4. Sample Excel Tracking Sheet
You can see that on June 3rd, for breakfast, there were 54 pounds of overproduced grain. For lunch on June 4th, there were 38 pounds of wasted dairy. We’re looking at the “overproduced” columns in this screenshot, but to the right you can see the beginning of the “accident” columns. On a second sheet in the Excel File/Google Sheet, total up all of the columns using SUM (Column Name). This will give you the basic data to start making some graphs from the information you’ve collected.
If you’d like more granular graphs, total each week and then compare the weeks. You can make it as simple or as complicated as you would like, it all depends on how comfortable you are and how much detail you want.
Here’s an example of what goes into a sheet similar to those used for data collection at Mountain View Correctional Facility.
Table 5. Mountain View Correctional Facility Sample Excel Tracking Sheet
These can be fed into pie graphs, line charts, or other useful graphs to see your data.
Continuing with our example, here is a graph showing the source of overproduced food at the facility:
Figure A. Sample Food Waste Category Pie Chart
As you can see, in this fictional facility, seafood is overproduced more than any other food type, and the kitchen should consider producing less of it. A great variety of graphs can be made, but the ones that have proved most insightful in my experience have been:
- Food Waste Cost by Food Type
- Pounds of Plate Waste by Food Type
- Pounds of Food Waste per Resident Over Time
- Pounds of Food Waste by Shift (to instill a bit of competition)
- Pounds of Food Waste by Meal
Final Thoughts
With this knowledge, you’ll be more able to make decisions on menu composition, purchasing practices, where to improve training, portion control, and many other topics, saving your business time and money while lowering your environmental impact.
About the Author
Ryan Fitzmaurice, UMaine Mitchell Center Student intern 2021-2023.
Ryan Fitzmaurice graduated from UMaine in 2023 with a double-major in Financial Economics and Math. His work with our Food Rescue MAINE team focused on using data and statistics to find sustainability solutions to real world problems. IFor additional information or for assistance with your waste tracking journey, please feel free to email our UMaine Mitchell Center Food Rescue MAINE team at umgmc@maine.edu.