How data is driving sustainable food solutions

Roughly one-third of all food produced globally is lost or discarded annually—resulting in people wasting a staggering one billion tonnes of food every year.

From the agricultural source of produce to meals finally being served up, every aspect of the food production cycle has an environmental impact—and can create a significant amount of waste, explains Hamish Cook, Head of Group Food Services at ISS.

“It’s a big area to tackle collectively,” says Hamish, whose role involves setting the strategic direction of the business’s global food operations. “Over the last decade, organisations have been more acutely aware of sustainability, and the food waste agenda has become a key focus.”

So how can companies effectively change their methods when it comes to serving meals to their workforce? With over one million customers served across more than 20 countries each day, ISS has dedicated in-house experts such as Hamish who find solutions to help tackle this challenge for clients. Key to their strategy is leveraging data and insights around food production and customer behaviours to help pinpoint areas for improvement. “People need to be measuring food waste on a daily basis, not just when there’s a problem,” he says.

Thinking critically about data 

First, Hamish explains, clients must understand where waste is being generated from. To do this, ISS uses an AI-based kitchen waste management system that analyses food waste across its global portfolio of businesses. ISS collects data from thousands of ISS locations and through the millions of transactions that occur weekly.

“Using this data, we found that production trimmings, plate waste and over production of main meals contribute to almost 60% of the total food waste generated in our business,” explains Hamish. These insights have helped ISS work with local site teams to strategically plan menus and optimise food portions as well as set specific targets for each country. Reviewing data sets to understand the nuances of individual locations as part of wider global trends is essential, adds Hamish.

“It was important for us to be clear about how we were going to measure greenhouse gas emissions and food waste,” he explains. This included taking guidance from the World Resources Institute and Winnow, a commercial food waste solution, on how the company should be categorising waste and emissions across the total food lifecycle and communicating that across the global business.

Hamish explains that the frequency with which organisations review their data is important. “It’s the discipline of reviewing figures daily, weekly, monthly—and then putting in corrective actions at a site or micro-level—that has been the basis for our success.”

Technologies can help companies to gather information at different sites. An innovative way ISS has been able to leverage data is through sensor technology. This not only helps capture how many people go into the office each day but also how many eat at the on-site restaurant. “Keeping track of those patterns really helps us minimise waste.”

This technology now has a 95% accuracy rate, which helps the sites minimise waste by being able to plan ahead. Through these data insights, ISS is now achieving a collective annualised saving rate of 985,000 tonnes of food waste for its customers. That is equivalent to saving 2,463,000 meals and reducing CO2 emissions by 4,200 tonnes.  

Changing behaviours 

It is important for companies to use data-led initiatives outside of the kitchen, too—educating office users and encouraging them to make more sustainable decisions around food. “We have technology that informs a customer of how much food they’re wasting when they’re scraping their plate,” adds Hamish. “In some locations, we contextualise this information to show how many car journeys a meal would translate to in order to help make the data tangible for customers.”

This is just one way ISS is helping their clients and customers to be more conscious about their choices. “Food is an emotive product,” Hamish says. “Everybody has a view and a comparison set about what food they think people want to eat—but we’re seeing an eagerness from clients to have discussions based on data and facts, which is helping us drive behavioural change.”

In 2020, ISS set targets to reduce food waste across the business by 50% by 2027 as well as decrease the amount of greenhouse gas emissions from food purchases by 25% by 2030.

In the first half of 2023 alone, ISS has seen a collective 30% reduction from its 2019 baseline food waste levels. From applying these insights in the workplace to changing people’s behaviours surrounding food, a real understanding of global and local trends—and collaboration from across the business—is vital to implement these changes.

“There isn’t one blanket solution to solve issues around food waste,” Hamish explains, but “by undertaking different initiatives regularly, we can make sure they add up to major performance changes across the organisation.”