‘We work with contract caterers, hotels, restaurants, care homes – anyone dealing with large amounts of food to help them measure what they are wasting and when, and take concrete steps to reduce it,’ says Tom Mansel of Lean Path – thus combating waste before the meal is even plated. ‘We measure waste pre-consumer – trimmings, spoilage and so on – and we work post-consumer, in levels of granularity.’ Put bluntly, with the aid of scales, cameras and user interfaces, Lean Path can take a look at the scrapings of each customer’s plate.

Maybe the portion sizes are too big. Maybe customers are being encouraged to over-order. Maybe the steak and chips, while a popular choice, is not meeting the customers’ expectations and being discarded. All this and more can be measured by Lean Path, simply through one of the kitchen team placing the food to be thrown on a built-in scale. ‘The camera takes a picture of the waste and the user answers a few questions about it, with just a few short taps,’ explains Tom – mindful that in the heat of the kitchen, the process must be speedy. That data is then automatically transmitted in real-time to the Lean Path Online Reporting Dashboard, which can analyse it and feedback on the food’s value, why it was wasted (‘burnt, poorly trimmed or peeled, surplus: all this we can see on the camera’) – and whether this is a recurring pattern – in which case, Lean Path will compute what the annual footprint of that waste would be in terms of, say, the number of cars on the road or the loss of revenue.

‘We use vivid equivalents to help teams engage with the concept, because the long-term goal of this technology is to enable a change in behaviour,’ says Tom. ‘Chefs are busy, and they want their fingers on the pulse of what is going on in the kitchen.’ To this end, Lean Path can provide the restaurants with an alert if what is on the scale is going over a certain cost threshold, and set smart goals based on the type of food being discarded, too.

Sometimes the solution is as simple as education. For example, if there’s routinely meat on the chucked fat rind, the staff need to brush up their knife skills. Often though, it is more complicated. Restaurants can inadvertently create waste in their efforts solve other problems. ‘Concerns about not producing enough food, concerns about food safety, pressure to provide a diversity of options: all this translates into overproduction and surplus food.

‘Where it starts to get interesting is when it is not just an individual kitchen, but a number of different kitchens across an operation,’ continues Tom. ‘That’s when this can help businesses make smart purchasing decisions, innovative new menus and thereby communicate to staff and customers the environmental and social value of these actions.’ At its best, technology like Lean Path serves simply to enable better decision making in the fast-paced, high-pressured world of catering – both by the leadership, and those they are leading.

For the last few years, research amongst young people suggests they care more for experiences than they do things – but that those experiences must align with their values. David Attenborough’s now-iconic Blue Planet II series is just the crest of the wave of environmental concern – anger, even – that has been building amongst younger generations for some time. As they become ever more painfully aware of the impacts of climate change, waste and the rise in food insecurity, these customers will be turning to brands and companies and demanding they up the ante: and they will not shy away from questioning the contents of their bin.