Salpaus Further Education is one of the largest vocational education providers in Finland. With food waste as a persistent challenge, its catering facilities set a goal to reduce food waste, improve food service operations and generate environmental benefits.
Research shows that approximately 25% of edible food is thrown away in restaurants and catering outlets every year. At Salpaus Further Education campuses, around 2,500 students, staff, and customers enjoy meals at their six catering outlets daily. Food waste is a persistent challenge, so Salpaus set a target to reduce waste, improve operations and gain environmental benefits.
Gaining overall control of food waste
Salpaus wanted a tool with reporting and waste management functionalities to enable its staff to address food waste problems and develop efficient ways of working.
Rollout from a single outlet to all restaurants
One of Salpaus’ catering outlets started using CGI Waste Manager for one school year, reducing food waste costs from 17 cents to less than 7 cents per customer during the eight-month pilot.
Overall, with CGI Waste Manager, Salpaus’ pilot catering outlet reduced food waste costs by 59%. As a result, the solution was deployed to the rest of its catering outlets, significantly improving its kitchen operations.
Our goal was to be able to monitor kitchen food waste on a concrete level instead of speculating. It is too easy to concentrate on waste caused by customer leftovers, which, in fact, is something we cannot even control.
Program Manager at Salpaus Further Education
Continuous improvement in kitchen operations
By collecting data in real time, CGI Waste Manager helps drive continuous improvement in food preparation. It enables food services providers to yrack and manage accumulated waste, drive efficiencies and save costs and reduce carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions.
Driving environmental sustainability
Food waste has a major environmental impact on the entire food production life cycle—from agriculture, to transport, to food storage and preparation. In fact, ISO 14001 environmental standards recommend that food service companies address their environmental impact on the entire food production chain in their environmental sustainability strategies.
CGI’s clients in the food services industry estimate that minimizing food waste is the most efficient way of developing more sustainable strategies. Through CGI Waste Manager, we help them to achieve this.
*CGI Waste Manager is part of the CGI Aromi solution portfolio.
