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The current scenario of providing meals to public and private services, schools, hospitals, homes, amongst others, is mainly related to the hiring of private companies that support these services, also called Collective Catering Companies, CCC (according to the Portuguese classification by Associação da Hotelaria, Restauração e Similares de Portugal, AHRESP, 2015).
Collective Catering (CC) is a distinctive service model based on the establishment of a catering contract between the client and a specialized company. For instance, in the Portuguese education area, about 67% of the school canteens, from primary to secondary education, are managed by private companies, which make up a total of approximately half a million meals served per day (Pinto & Ávila, 2015).
The breadth of those services requires meal planning and optimization of production processes in order to control food waste. This control has a direct implication on all key sustainability issues. So, the rationalization of food confection to reduce waste production and raises an environmental impact, that also mitigates costs while creates social value through the challenge of “useful waste”, and by waste reuse projects (e.g. Portuguese projects like Refood and Frigorífico Solidário, amongst many others).
Based on the information gathered (“Food Service Europe” and the EU Platform on Food Losses and Food Waste, 2019) in Europe about 67 million meals are served every day by catering companies. Given the size of this sector, one of the major challenges that CC industry faces is food waste. Herein, food waste can be defined as “any by-product or residual product of food production, processing, distribution and consumption”. A global picture of food waste in numbers shows that 1/3 of the food produced in the world is lost or wasted, in Europe 89 million tonnes of food is wasted every year and in Portugal, 17% of the food produced is also wasted (Comissão Nacional de Combate ao Desperdício Alimentar, 2018).
Globally, scientific research on the effectiveness of food waste prevention initiatives is in its early stages, and existing studies have identified the need to evaluate consistently such actions to reach sound conclusions and prioritize efforts. Caldeira et al. (2019) and more recently De Laurentiis et al. (2019), went in that direction, by developing an evaluation framework assessing the performance of food waste prevention actions, and a calculator (built on the principle of life cycle thinking) supporting the quantification of the economic and environmental benefits.
The increased interest in the environmental and economic damage caused by food waste (FAO, 2019) has led to a growing political and public consensus on the need to address this challenge (as proven by the inclusion of food waste reduction in the Farm to Fork Strategy for Sustainable food, currently being developed by the European Commission as part of the European Green Deal, 2019). Nevertheless, there is a lack of studies assessing the efficacy of such prevention measures, mainly due to the absence of evidence.
Following that lack of research, this proposal focus precisely on data gathering, monitoring and measuring to generate visual evidences and alerts to help decision making process on food services and, therefore, put in place waste prevention measures. To carry out waste monitoring, a dashboard tool (i.e. decision interface and a visual framework) was proposed and developed to support the catering services sector. These types of decision facilities allow a quick understanding of the metrics most relevant to a particular goal or process of the company (Alexander & Walkenbach, 2013). Also, some dataset comparative analysis are developed to identify alerts from data and to evaluate the impact of reactive actions on food waste.
On the other side, contribution up to-date, even focusing different food waste perspectives agreed on the relevance of systematic evaluations using frameworks that implement standards (e.g. definitions, measurement methods, etc.) to ensure not only the assessments but also the framework effectiveness. So, the collection and consistent reporting of data before/during/after the designed actions is conducted to enable their evaluation according to the framework standards (De Laurentiis et al., 2020).