Waste control in a catering company: Data analysis and decision interfaces

This paper studies the food waste problem in private and public collective catering units (CCU), served by a Portuguese catering company. The main objective is to develop data analysis and decision tools that may contribute to the waste control and to the operational planning of CCU. A set of novel key performance indicators (KPIs) are settled and evaluated to characterize food waste over time. For these indicators, several representations were studied, tested, and validated to create a dashboard intended to be clear and intuitive, regarding the food wastes. Operating practices require simple, objective, replicable, and ideally inexpensive data collection procedures. So, the proposed solution accounts for the trade-off between the details of the created data model and the associated data synthesis and visualization. The proposal (indicators and dashboard) was submitted to four weeks of tests, in six CCUs. The organizational validation achieved allows the conclusion about the interest of this contribution.