Andrew Shakman - Building Leanpath and Changing Kitchen Culture

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 glance00:36 Why a Third of All Food Never Gets Eaten02:09 The Management Science Kitchens Are Missing04:51 What Leanpath Actually Does Inside a Kitchen11:32 Touchless Tracking Without Thoughtless Wasting17:48 Why There Are No Bad Actors in Food WasteAbout Andrew ShakmanAndrew 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 workAndrew Shakman on LinkedIn → https://www.linkedin.com/in/andrew-shakman-3861/Leanpath → leanpath.comSend us a message!