When talking about food waste in collective catering, school and corporate canteens, it’s tempting to picture a single, uniform phenomenon. In reality, waste is generated at different moments of the production and distribution process, with different causes, responsibilities and solutions. Telling these moments apart is the first step toward targeted action, and it’s exactly the approach behind the solutions built by NANDO (nandoai.com), an AI waste monitoring platform, for the food service sector.
What Is Plate Waste
Plate waste is food that has been served to the guest but not consumed: what’s left on the plate at the end of the meal. It’s the most visible type of waste, and the one most directly tied to individual preferences, portion sizes and eating habits, a student leaving the vegetables untouched, an employee who took a larger portion than they could finish, a patient who didn’t like a particular dish.
This waste occurs “downstream” in the process: the food has already been produced, distributed, often already plated using ingredients that were already purchased. Measuring it therefore means observing what happens after distribution, at the moment trays are returned or plates are scraped into organic waste bins.
What Is Kitchen Waste (Overproduction)
Kitchen waste, or overproduction, is instead food that was prepared but never reached the diner: the surplus left in gastronorm pans at the end of a shift, the result of a production estimate that was too optimistic relative to actual attendance or that day’s preferences.
Unlike plate waste, this type of waste is generated “upstream,” at the planning and preparation stage, and is therefore the one most directly linked to the kitchen’s management decisions: how many portions to prepare for each recipe, how much raw material to purchase, how to calibrate the menu based on historical consumption.
Why the Distinction Matters
The two types of waste call for different levers of intervention:
- Plate waste is addressed by working on customizable portioning, menu composition, and communication and awareness campaigns aimed at guests, a type of waste that partly depends on behavioural variables that are hard to control upstream.
- Kitchen waste is instead addressed by working on production planning: forecasting attendance, calibrating quantities per recipe, and managing raw material purchases, a type of waste more directly traceable to the facility’s operational decisions.
Measuring only one of the two gives an incomplete picture. An organization that reduces plate waste by communicating better with its guests, but keeps overproducing in the kitchen, will still carry a high waste cost — simply shifted “upstream” in the chain. This is why an effective monitoring system needs to distinguish and quantify the two components separately.
How NANDO Measures Plate Waste: NANDO.App
To monitor plate waste, NANDO.App relies on smartphone-based waste measurement: staff photograph the bins dedicated to organic waste at the end of the meal, and the system turns those images into structured data on quantity, composition and estimated weight of the waste. This means detection doesn’t require manual weighing or paper logs, but fits naturally into the facility’s daily workflow through a simple photo.
The same image-recognition technology can also be applied to the overproduction side, by photographing gastronorm pans at the end of a shift: the system collects data on the quantities of food that was prepared but not used, giving operators an initial reading tool on the kitchen waste side as well.
How NANDO Measures Overproduction: NANDO.Canteen
For a more specific monitoring of kitchen waste, NANDO.Canteen uses dedicated technology: the system recognizes and counts the portions actually served for each recipe on the daily menu, then estimates the ratio between quantities produced and quantities distributed.
This kind of data is particularly useful for kitchen planning: knowing precisely how many portions of a given recipe are actually consumed, day after day, allows for better-calibrated production quantities, avoiding systematic overproduction and, upstream, reducing unnecessary raw material purchases.
From Measurement to Process Optimization: the Centralized Dashboard
The data collected by NANDO.App and NANDO.Canteen flows into a centralized dashboard, which makes it possible to:
- track waste trends over time, distinguishing between plate waste and kitchen waste;
- compare results across different facilities, useful for organizations managing multiple canteens or sites;
- identify the main areas for intervention, directing corrective actions toward the stage of the process — service or production — where waste is actually concentrated.
The information gathered supports the reduction of food waste in collective catering in a targeted way: knowing the number of portions served for each recipe makes it possible to optimize both the quantities prepared and the menu itself, based on actual consumption rather than rough estimates.
In Summary
Plate waste and kitchen waste are not synonyms, but two distinct phenomena generated at different stages of the collective catering chain: the first downstream, at the moment of consumption; the second upstream, at the production stage. An effective approach to reducing food waste requires measuring them separately, in order to act with the right levers on each. This is the logic behind NANDO’s solutions for the sector: NANDO.App on the plate waste front, and, partly, on overproduction through photographic analysis of gastronorm pans, and NANDO.Canteen for a more granular, recipe-by-recipe monitoring of kitchen waste, with the shared goal of turning daily collected data into operational decisions that cut waste at the source.
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