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Jim Cooley is Executive Chef
with Bon Appetit Management Company at Seattle
University. He oversees culinary operations for five
locations on this urban campus, anchored by the busy and
modern Cherry Street Market. Jim has spent the past nine
years on the campus of this independent, Jesuit Catholic
university in the Pacific Northwest.
Seattle University has been using food waste tracking
tools from LeanPath to track all pre-consumer food waste
for 1.5 years through a unique public/private
partnership funded partially by
Seattle Public Utilities.
"I always have good food cost
here even with very high [product costs]. I attribute it
to ValuWaste."
Chef Jim reports that food
waste tracking “works great" while emphasizing it's
important to "use the tools and let them help you.”
One of Chef Jim's top goals was to reduce waste.
He participates in food waste composting and food
recovery initiatives but also sees the importance of
reducing waste at the source, because that avoids the
waste altogether and reduces costs for the operation.
When the operation started waste tracking, one of their
objectives was to lower or maintain food costs.
Many operators have experienced
that food prices have risen quite a bit with the current
economy. However Chef Jim states “I always have good
food cost here even with very [product costs]. I
attribute it to ValuWaste”. Using the ValuWaste system
to track any wasted pre-consumer food items allows him
to adjust production or manage his
menus to keep costs in line.
He was most surp rised
by the amount of
overproduction as a whole. For example, the system
helped him to identify the overproduction of starches
and vegetables, and he was
able to reduce the
production of those items, but more importantly, recover
some of those items for other uses.
Chef Jim’s advice for Chef's new to waste tracking :
“Get the entire team on-board from the start. My staff
was on board the very first day.” An engaged staff makes
the program run efficiently and
creates better data. His
foodservice staff “tended to police itself and started
using different practices to save time, i.e. using 1
waste container per table” to collect kitchen waste.
An added benefit, and one of the best parts of using the
ValuWaste program, is that it “raises awareness of the
entire staff as to food waste and abuse.” The staff at
Seattle University even came up with different
suggestions for waste categories, again making the
system work more efficiently by providing the chef with
better data about his operation.
“The staff likes and uses it”
says Chef Jim. “New people actually hounded me to get
their name in the data base.”
Read a Seattle University Spectator article on
Bon Appetit's
use of LeanPath's food waste tracking tools:
"Bon Appetit Weighs in on Waste, Consumption" |
