Andrew Shakman - The Four-Layer Cake of Food Waste Prevention

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 Glance00:54 Why Storytelling Is the Most Powerful Tool for Change03:27 The "Prevention" seed: Growing up in a mission-driven home05:02 From Film School to the Early Internet07:17 How Food Brands Changed Everything12:53 The Four-Layer Cake of Food Waste Analogy19:18 Leadership lessons learned from training "problem horses"About 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!