Up to a third of all food produced globally is lost or wasted, and up to 10% of greenhouse gas emissions are tied to it. The opportunity to fix that sits largely inside professional kitchens, and most of them have no system for even measuring the problem. That is exactly what Andrew Shakman in Leanpath was built to change.

Andrew's reframe for kitchens is simple and a little uncomfortable: they are factories. High volume, high complexity, constantly changing menus, and almost none of the process improvement thinking that transformed manufacturing over the last century. No Six Sigma. No statistical process control. Just skilled people running on experience and a deep, quiet anxiety about running out of food. That anxiety, Andrew explains, is where most waste actually comes from. Not negligence, not carelessness, but a system designed to use waste as a buffer against risk. Once you see it that way, the problem starts to look solvable.

Leanpath's approach is to make the invisible visible. A camera above a bin, a scale underneath it, and suddenly a kitchen knows not just that food is being wasted, but what, how much, and why. Andrew walks through twenty years of that evolution, from rudimentary touchscreens and USB sticks in 2004 to AI-powered tracking today. He also makes a case that doesn't get made often enough: that frontline kitchen workers are among the most underestimated climate actors in the world. They already understand the value of food. What Leanpath gives them is the data to act on it, and the evidence that their daily choices add up to something impactful.

Episode in a glance

00:36 Why a Third of All Food Never Gets Eaten
02:09 The Management Science Kitchens Are Missing
04:51 What Leanpath Actually Does Inside a Kitchen
11:32 Touchless Tracking Without Thoughtless Wasting
17:48 Why There Are No Bad Actors in Food Waste

About Andrew Shakman

Andrew Shakman is the co-founder and CEO of Leanpath, the global leader in food waste prevention technology for foodservice operations. With a background spanning theater, film producing, and early internet digital marketing, Andrew brings a distinctly human-centered lens to one of the most consequential environmental challenges of our time. Under his leadership, Leanpath has grown into an enterprise platform used in over 50 countries, helping some of the world's largest food service and hospitality organizations measure, understand, and dramatically reduce the food they waste.

Connect with Andrew Shakman and his work

• Andrew Shakman on LinkedIn → https://www.linkedin.com/in/andrew-shakman-3861/
• Leanpath → leanpath.com

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Andrew Shakman is the CEO of Leanpath, a company on a mission to make food waste prevention everyday practice in professional kitchens worldwide. Before any of that, he was a child actor, a film school graduate, and a digital marketer selling Cap'n Crunch on the early internet.

Andrew Shakman did not set out to work in sustainability. He set out to tell stories that mattered. What drew him, from early childhood through film school and into his career, was a hunger for meaning and a fascination with how things work. His father was a preventive medicine pioneer writing about food and health in the 1970s, long before the medical world caught up. It took Andrew ten years of running Leanpath to realize he had followed the same instinct into a different field. That kind of slow, earned self-awareness runs all through his story.

What makes Andrew's background so interesting is how little of it looks deliberate from the outside. Theater in college. An MFA in film producing. One of the first digital marketing agencies on the early internet, where he happened to land food and beverage clients. Each chapter looks like a detour until Andrew connects the dots himself, and suddenly the whole thing makes sense. By the time he stumbled into food waste, he had already spent years learning how to build things, how to bring people along, and how to make a complex problem feel urgent to someone who has never thought about it before. He calls it baking a four-layer cake: get people to care about food waste, convince them prevention beats composting, show them measurement is the path to prevention, then make the case for automation. Most conversations never made it past the first layer. It turned out those were exactly the skills that problem needed.

Episode at a Glance

00:54 Why Storytelling Is the Most Powerful Tool for Change
03:27 The "Prevention" seed: Growing up in a mission-driven home
05:02 From Film School to the Early Internet
07:17 How Food Brands Changed Everything
12:53 The Four-Layer Cake of Food Waste Analogy
19:18 Leadership lessons learned from training "problem horses"

About Andrew Shakman

Andrew Shakman is the co-founder and CEO of Leanpath, the global leader in food waste prevention technology for foodservice operations. With a background spanning theater, film producing, and early internet digital marketing, Andrew brings a distinctly human-centered lens to one of the most consequential environmental challenges of our time. Under his leadership, Leanpath has grown into an enterprise platform used in over 50 countries, helping some of the world's largest food service and hospitality organizations measure, understand, and dramatically reduce the food they waste.

Connect with Andrew Shakman and his work

• Andrew Shakman on LinkedIn → https://www.linkedin.com/in/andrew-shakman-3861/
• Leanpath → leanpath.com

Send us a message!

Nancy Zavada returns for part two of her Green Champions conversation, this time pulling back the curtain on the actual work behind sustainable events. As president of MeetGreen, Nancy has saved clients $7.8 million in sustainability-driven decisions and cut $2.5 million in aisle carpet alone from a single event last year. This episode is a masterclass in making the business case for doing things better.

On a cross-country flight, she ordered tea in economy and got a styrofoam cup, a plastic stir stick, and a sugar packet. On the way back, upgraded to first class, the same tea arrived in a china cup with a silver spoon and a sugar cube. That airline wasn't trying to be sustainable. They were trying to be elegant. Nancy's point is that we've somehow convinced ourselves that sustainability means sacrifice, when the most refined, considered experiences have always been the most efficient.

The practical strategies Nancy shares in this episode are the kind that stick. The Clean Plate Club, which turns food waste reduction into a community game at multi-day conferences. The stone-in-a-jar voting system that replaced conference swag with charitable giving. The carbon uncalculator MeetGreen built during COVID to show clients exactly how much emissions they avoided by going virtual. And the emerging Hub and Spoke event model that she believes is the next major shift in how organizations gather. Each idea is grounded in the same philosophy: reduce first, always. Then measure, share the data, and let the numbers do the talking.

Episode in a glance

02:08 The internal focus group: Balancing logistics with sustainability
04:54 Rebranding Green: Why first class is the ultimate sustainability model
06:46 The Clean Plate Club: Gamifying food waste at scale
14:00 The $7.8M Business Case: Saving money through intentional reduction
23:44 The Hub and Spoke: Why the future of gathering is regional

About Nancy Zavada

Nancy Zavada is the Founder and President of MeetGreen, a firm dedicated to providing sustainable event management and consulting for some of the world's most recognizable brands. With over three decades of experience, Nancy is a recognized leader in the industry, helping organizations reduce their environmental footprint while maintaining high-quality attendee experiences. She is an Oregon native, a lifelong environmentalist, and a passionate mentor to the next generation of green event professionals.

Connect with Nancy Zavada and her work

• Email → nancy@meetgreen.com
• LinkedIn → Nancy Zavada
• Company Website → MeetGreen

Send us a message!