Most Food Waste Never Reaches a Plate

What if one of the most effective climate tech moves in hospitality isn’t flashy at all, but simply wasting less food with far better data?

In this episode, I’m joined by Olaf van der Veen, co-founder of Orbisk, to unpack a climate tech story that sits right at the intersection of decarbonisation, operational control, and the energy transition. We talk about food waste, but this is bigger than leftovers. It’s about hidden system failure, margin pressure, emissions reduction, and why cutting waste may be one of the most practical net zero levers available to commercial kitchens right now.

You’ll hear why food waste in restaurants, hotels, cruise ships, and corporate dining is often less about bad habits and more about broken forecasting, poor process design, and weak visibility. We dig into how Orbisk uses AI, computer vision, and IoT to show kitchens exactly what is being wasted, when, and why, and how that turns a vague sustainability ambition into something measurable and fixable. You might be shocked to learn how often the real losses happen before food ever reaches a plate.

We also get into the harder-edged business case: why food waste is pure bottom-line loss, why economics still drive most action faster than policy, and how the smartest operators are linking profitability and sustainability instead of pretending they sit on opposite sides of the ledger. No fluff. No green gloss. Just real-world climate solutions that cut costs, improve control, and reduce emissions.

🎙️ Listen now to hear how Olaf van der Veen and Orbisk are turning food waste into a serious climate tech and decarbonisation opportunity.

Sign up to Climate Confident+ for deep dive analysis of the major climate and energy stories of the day.

Transcript

Olaf van der Veen: 0:04

That means you buy 120% of food to serve a hundred percent of your guests, right? If you can serve the same a hundred percent of guests with 105% of food, everyone's happy because the rest is pure bottom line loss.

Tom Raftery: 0:20

That's the real point. Food waste isn't just a sustainability issue, it's a systems failure hiding in plain sight. Good morning, good afternoon, or good evening, wherever you are. This is Climate Confident -stories and strategies that cut emissions episode 270, and I'm Tom Raftery. My guest today is Olaf van der Veen, co-founder of Orbisk, a company using AI and computer vision to help commercial kitchens cut food waste. What makes this conversation matter is that it moves the issue beyond guilt and leftovers and into forecasting, process design, margins, and operational control at a time when food costs, reporting pressure, and sustainability expectations are all rising. So I started by asking Olaf what pulled him into the food waste problem in the first place.

Olaf van der Veen: 1:17

I'm Olaf van der Veen I'm one of the founders at Orbisk and at Orbisk we, manage food waste. We mitigate food waste levels in the food services industry, so hotels, cruise ships, restaurants, all of that using the power of AI image recognition and and IoT technologies.

Tom Raftery: 1:36

Okay, fantastic. And what pulled you into this problem in the first place? It seems kind of niche.

Olaf van der Veen: 1:43

It's an interesting one. It's a very broad niche, I would say. Obviously it's one of the subsectors of the food industry, but the food industry is obviously very large, and very fundamental to what makes us human, eating in the first place. So, what brought me to this niche, in my previous life, having a normal career before being an entrepreneur, let's say, I was a data consultant and as a data consultant, your skill is to be the interpreter between business and technology. Which I think is my talent in life. I'm not a coder, nor am I a salesperson, but I speak both languages relatively well, and I wanted to use that capability for something that I found more meaningful than what I was doing at the time, which was something in marketing and media. So, I wanted to find a big problem in the sustainability space especially because I wanted to do something good in this world, and I started researching what's the biggest problems in this world? Like literally on the sustainability angle, what's the biggest things we should be solving at this point in time? And food waste came out on top, in every single list that I found. And in my student days, I used to work in restaurants, so I knew the space very intimately. So I knew, what this world looked like, what you can ask and not ask of the people that work in it, and why this problem was unsolved until this point. I realised what I saw going wrong in all of those outlets. Well, and eight years later, here we are. That's what started it.

Tom Raftery: 3:12

And when did food waste stop looking like a kitchen issue and start looking like a systems issue?

Olaf van der Veen: 3:20

That's a super interesting one. I don't think I've ever spoken that out loud. But thinking back about my first days in the very first restaurant, so what I started doing, like a good sort of solution designer would, is really get intimate with your clients. So the first thing I did is together with my co-founder, spent about a week in a restaurant from opening time to closing time every single day. tracking every single gram that went into that waste bin. Just for perspective. We were there all day. Not in the restaurant, but at the waste bin with our pen and paper validating the business case. Now, the assumption that most people have is that obviously it's about plate waste. It's about the stuff you didn't eat. That's food waste. But as it turned out in that restaurant myself, I found out that some 70% of the food being wasted never even reaches a plate. 70% of the food being wasted, it goes lost in overproduction, overstocking or wrong operating procedures. Everything basically back of house, everything up to the buffet, let's say,

Tom Raftery: 4:22

Right.

Olaf van der Veen: 4:22

buffet also being one of those still food that never reached a plate. And that's a systems problem. That's not a behavioral problem. That's a problem. And it's a system problem that has an origin for all sorts of right reasons, which is more than anything, guest satisfaction. That's what the hospitality industry lives for. But it is a system that can be optimised when, generating more control over it.

Tom Raftery: 4:49

And food waste gets treated like bad habits in the kitchen, when it is probably a design flow in the wider system, no?

Olaf van der Veen: 4:58

Also, yes. I mean if you really look back at where we come from, the generation of my grandmother, the war and postwar generation, they still knew the value of food because they knew what being short looked like. All of us alive in the Western world at least, have never experienced that. And, that's deteriorated the perceived value of food quite significantly. Now, let's be absolutely clear. I've never met a person in this world, and I don't think there literally is one person that loves to waste food. Still no one does. Perceived value is pretty low, but no one loves wasting food. But you know, having said that the perceived value is so low that we do consider it acceptable or we've become numb to this sensation of seeing it happening in this context where guest satisfaction is your number one priority. So, that's basically what's driving the food waste levels. But again, everyone is open to having it become less, by all means by getting more control over it.

Tom Raftery: 6:02

And then why is food waste still so stubborn?

Olaf van der Veen: 6:06

Food waste is a very very complex problem. Finishing my first sentence again, it for guest satisfaction in these units is the highest thing they strive for, and they should be because that's what hospitality is all about, but it can be better nonetheless. The other thing is that food is such an immensely complex item to hold on stock and work with. But more than that, the moment you basically start working with it, it also expires within an unreasonable amount of time. It's, some things expire within an hour. Other things might expire within two or four days. But the moment you start touching it, it starts to expire instantly in your hands. And that makes it so hard to plan with and work with. And that's why, you know, these two things combined, guest satisfaction and the expiry of food are so difficult to deal with.,

Tom Raftery: 6:58

And where in the food system is the biggest disconnect? Is it purchasing? Is it menu design? Is it forecasting, portioning, incentives, culture, something else entirely? All of the above?

Olaf van der Veen: 7:11

Yes. All of the above, I'm afraid. I've got a different answer for every single restaurant almost, I would say, because that's the thing about the business that we run. I wish that I would be able to put our technology in restaurants and find the golden solution let's say. Tell it to everyone and solve this problem. I'll get a Nobel Prize and I won't have a business. I'm perfectly fine with that, but that's just not the way it is. The way it is currently is that every restaurant has its own story. It might indeed be incentives, it might be your procurement procedures. It might be your menu design that generates more than that. So it really depends on the type of restaurant you run, the type of people that run it, the procedures that are underlying. And one level above that, where the most food waste in general is, is a restaurant is number two, actually. The number one wasting industry, if you will, is consumer homes. You and me. I'm afraid. And that is a behavior thing that is something that I really wanna throw myself at at some point in the not so distant future because I'm super passionate about it. But that's not a, a design problem. That's a proper behavioral change problem.

Tom Raftery: 8:21

And so who actually owns the waste problem in most organisations? And is the problem a lack of data or a lack of accountability?

Olaf van der Veen: 8:30

The waste is owned by the operator themselves, in most cases, not exclusively, but basically, assuming that you have a waste level of 20%, 15 to 20% is industry average. That means you buy 120% of food to serve a hundred percent of your guests, right? If you can serve the same a hundred percent of guests with 105% of food, everyone's happy because the rest is pure bottom line loss. And generally that is owned by the operator. Now why isn't it solved yet? For one, the food was not only perceived, as low value for the longest time, it was very low value. Recent events in the last couple years have increased food prices dramatically, which, improves the incentives to reduce it. But also the lack of traceability for it. If you can imagine a restaurant, it's an operating machine, and that waste bin is the least favorite place where any one of these people want to be in that process. All day long bits and pieces go into that waste bin in an unstructured way. And that's why, it's just a very big gaping black hole in the back of your kitchen. All of your kitchen inefficiencies will end up there. So that's the hole that we decided to start quantifying and qualifying. And advising upon.

Tom Raftery: 9:51

And so if the problem is bigger than bad habits, the obvious question is what kind of intervention changes behavior at scale? You know, what does a serious attempt to reduce food waste look like in a commercial kitchen?

Olaf van der Veen: 10:06

Yeah. let me give you a couple of examples. So, for instance, that would be optimising your, buffet guest flows or your buffet setups, designs on how you literally to make something very tangible, taking away trays from a buffet works perfectly because people I'm not sure if your mom told you the same, but my mom always told me, your eyes are bigger than your stomach. literally true. Like people overestimate how hungry they are, thus If they ever got a tray that there's a lot of room to fill with food that you might just not eat. So just taking away trays in most cases, especially in places where the buffet is free, is the very, very, very first solution because at least then you're, you can only fill your plates which takes significantly less food, and neither you or me will probably eat more than a plate full of food in one sitting. So. That's already already one of them. Another one is, is indeed revisiting your purchasing schedules and your production schedules from the moment indeed, you touch your food. That food is expiring, let's say within two days. Especially within European health norms. Most of the food will expire within 48 hours from the moment you've, like, literally you cooked it.

Tom Raftery: 11:22

Oh.

Olaf van der Veen: 11:22

Which means that if you produce it just before you serve it, you have the most possible opportunities to still serve it if it wasn't finished. If you start producing it a day ahead of time, then it's, you know, you've got only one serve serving moment left. My co-founder accurately said there's probably only 50 to a hundred problems and possible solutions, but you never know which combination of those problems exist in what kitchen, and that's what we're there for.

Tom Raftery: 11:49

And what kind of information therefore allows you to enable kitchens to make changes?

Olaf van der Veen: 11:58

Yeah, so, so what we do, like we, what we literally do as a company is we outfit the waste bin that big gaping black hole that we talked about with a weighing scale underneath, and a camera unit above, which is absolutely seamless to your process. It's not in the way, it's literally under your existing waste bin. the moment our technology is there, every single scrap that goes into that waste bin goes tracked using computer vision technology. So we quantify that food by some 800 different ingredient labels, labels anything from oysters to lasagna, to cheesecake, to, carrot tops, allowing us to see what food goes to waste when. And why. We can see, of course, it's carrot tops. It came in on a Tuesday morning at eight, and it came from a cutting board. So scraps like literal shavings or, Wednesday night at 10:30, say you had half a cheesecake, enter your waste bin. Thus the cheesecake at your dessert buffet was way too much for the amount of guests that you received. In fact, and that's where the, the real magic comes because we do that, that every day, we can show them in fact, every Wednesday you waste about half a cheesecake. Or maybe in fact every single weekday you, you waste half a cheesecake and we come, we aggregate that data to start making sense and show patterns in what things are structurally wasted that would be unable to individually track by human eyes. Then have an AI assistant on top of that, that literally takes in extra culinary advice and contextual factors about your restaurant even further elevating that data to give advice, okay, this is what we think you can do about this problem.

Tom Raftery: 14:11

Okay, so where does AI help most and where do you still need human judgment?

Olaf van der Veen: 14:17

What AI helps with most is, that computer vision, that image recognition algorithm, that's pure AI. We have AI trained to recognise food in all shapes and sizes. Pure AI, and that AI is not a percent perfect 'cause food is a very subjective thing. I mean, no one really knows what the exact definition of a salad versus mixed vegetables is, but you know, there you have it. But that, that's, that's pretty accurate. The AI culinary advisor that I spoke of, that's an interesting one because I really deeply believe in this space and many others about the symbiosis between AI giving suggestions, giving directional suggestions and the chef actually looking at this, validating this and putting their human knowledge and their contextual situation of that particular day to combined use. We've got some projects running where we not only track their waste levels, but also forecast what we think their guests will be eating tomorrow. We've been able to prove that our forecasts and the chef's forecast are more or less of the same quality, but their combined forecast work better than either one of them. So that's real symbiosis between the actual operators that know their restaurants, and data trends that allows us to see, what's structurally probably true.

Tom Raftery: 15:37

And in terms of the bin, is it a custom bin or can you work with any kind of bin?

Olaf van der Veen: 15:44

Anything. That's exactly what we designed it for. I believe in the, inherent laziness of people, let's say, or let's say ease of use in a more, on a more positive note, meaning that the only way things like this can work is if it's absolutely seamless. Kitchens are small, people are busy. So this thing needs to be there and do its job by itself without standing in the way. So we literally outfit your existing wastebin. In fact, we're even on cruise ships where, their processes are immense. We had to build some custom stuff there, but it even outfits the most exotic type of waste setups.

Tom Raftery: 16:22

Interesting. And does whoever is putting their waste into the bin, do they have to pause for a second while the photograph is being taken, or is it just seamless to just open the bin, push it in, and the photograph is taken without their knowledge, or not without their knowledge, but without their having to make any change to their existing routine.

Olaf van der Veen: 16:39

Currently we've always worked with a system that takes under half a second. It's literally beep and go. We've even taken that, we're taking that away now so that anything that comes within, even sort of the, the space of that wastebin will be automatically checked without them indeed needing to do a deliberate action. We explicitly from the start decided to put a screen on our technology to make sure that we're visibly present in that kitchen. Not only because the data is one thing, but the awareness is another one. And that's what I also believe, like driving behavior change requires to this, it instills some sort of awareness. This screen creates this for every single disposal action creates this micro awareness. Wait here I am again with that half cheesecake. So not only the person doing the planning, but also the person that that is responsible for the throwing away, which very important to mention is not the person at fault here necessarily

Tom Raftery: 17:37

Sure.

Olaf van der Veen: 17:37

They just clean up the buffet or whatever it was. But they also get a micro awareness moment. Wait, I'm here again with that half cheesecake so that they also can, get some creativity here and there.

Tom Raftery: 17:49

And how well does this scale both upwards and downwards? Because you have hotels, you can have hotel chains or restaurant chains that have hundreds or thousands of outlets, and then you can have mom and pop restaurants, little corner restaurants. So where do you fall within that spectrum?

Olaf van der Veen: 18:13

Currently we're more active in those bigger outlets, indeed, bigger hotels, corporate dining. We work for the Dutch Ministry of Defense. We work for quite big organisations. Because they are generally most data driven already. A mom and pop restaurant will be less so data driven. They're, somewhere between you an institution and a consumer. You would say. It's somewhat of a machine, but it's also somewhat gut feeling. About their, processes. And the other one is by working for these big organisations, it's also they have the most waste. So that's where we can drive the most impact, and that's what we're there for. I dream of a world where we can actually work for even these mom and pop restaurants and further go into this behavior change angle because, let's say our current solution is, fit for the top 25% of markets, 30 maybe, to provide super healthy ROIs, provide the right sort of data that they can work with. But I dream of a solution in a not so distant future that is, available to like 80% of market because I want everyone to be able to contribute to this fight against food waste to get the same opportunities of the, financial upside of reducing of wasting less and make sure that these mom and pop restaurants will also thrive.

Tom Raftery: 19:35

Okay. And when organisations start tackling food waste properly, what kind of results matter most first cost, carbon, culture, consistency, again all of the above, or something else entirely?

Olaf van der Veen: 19:50

All of the above. With those I can score for priority. When I started this business, I was looking for a problem that would have a business case for the person that needed to make the change, the economic benefits sits with the same person that needs to adopt this solution. Otherwise, the incentive structure is very hard. So, having said that financial's first priority. The hospitality industry is a, an industry that works on incredibly tight margins. So this thing needs to be able to afford itself. And in fact, we turn out ROIs up to 20 x. So it does pay for itself easily, but that is the first concern. When that concern is covered, then every one of our clients has a sustainability ambition. That's why they come and find us out in the first place. But because we're one of those solutions that has sustainability inherent to a positive business case, and that's, on a world level, not unique, almost all sustainability initiatives on a societal level have a positive ROI. But this has a direct positive ROI on them. The third reason in the consecutive order is control, getting a grip on their processes, getting more visibility on their internal operations. Fourth is compliance. More and more regulation is coming up where people need to be able to report on their food waste. A fifth, but not insignificant is also just employer branding. There's more and more people, especially in hospitality industry. There's, a lot of young people in your staff and they more than the average population, expect you to take responsibility for the operations that you run. So we've also heard people say, this literally helps us to attract people, good people to our kitchens.

Tom Raftery: 21:37

And what have you learned about the link then between profitability and sustainability from this work?

Olaf van der Veen: 21:45

The link between profitability and sustainability. Again, societally. I think everything that we do right now more or less has a positive ROI because world is burning and all of that. We need to do it all basically. But in this case, it's literally dual purpose. And that's why I don't need to care about the motivation of my clients, which I find a beautiful thing. I literally don't have to care if they want to run a more sustainable operations or buy a bigger car.'cause the results are the same. Every single kilo that is out of that waste bin is both gonna run a more sustainable business and buy them a bigger car. But hopefully they'll use that money to invest in other sort of sustainable initiatives or the quality of the food, which we often see. But in the end, I don't need to care for their motivation because it's inherent. That's a beautiful thing about the business model. That's I appreciate every day still.

Tom Raftery: 22:40

What would you say are the least glamorous changes that often have the biggest impact?

Olaf van der Veen: 22:46

most of it is unsexy. it's the small little things of different storage containers. it's the cutting your melons ever so slightly different. It's the operating hours of your prep kitchen. it's sort of, it's very unsexy stuff. and there's, there's a lot of exotic stories, don't get me wrong. I got a couple fun ones. But the real stuff, the big impactful stuff is small, little seemingly insignificant changes that have a big impact down the line of your process. And I don't need it to be sexy. In fact, if you look through our website, we hardly even, I mean, AI being the buzzword of society more or less at this point in time, I don't need our solution to be sexy. And our website doesn't really mention AI that much. I want a solution like this to be commoditised. I want it to be as normal for waste tracking one way or the other, to be in your kitchen as an oven is. So most of it is unsexy and I'm proud of that. I would say.

Tom Raftery: 23:47

Okay. I can't let you say that you've got a load of fun stories and not ask you to, pull one or two of those out and share them with us.

Olaf van der Veen: 23:57

Yeah. So there's from a business perspective, this is a super sexy one. There was a, hotel that served pizzas somewhere, like a big hotel. They had a pizza bar somewhere, and they they started to see that basically they just had a lot of plate waste on their pizza orders, meaning that their pizzas were too big, so they, made their pizzas a little bit smaller. No guest has ever complained. They were still super happy about the pizzas, and they started selling more desserts, which to an operator is a very, very sexy story. But also we had a hotel that ran a buffet set up for dinner in the weekend days because it was a business hotel. In the weekdays, they run an ho la carte menu. And we saw that they did so because a buffet setup requires one FTE, less in terms of kitchen capacity, one less chef in your kitchen. So they thought this was a cost positive solution. We found out that the waste levels were so high that you could hire two and a half chefs just on the difference in waste levels between those days. So they also hired an extra chef in the weekend, started turning out a la carte, waste levels dropped and guest satisfaction improved all in one. It's this kind of stories, that are all around, that are like the sexier stories for an operator to hear.

Tom Raftery: 25:12

Nice. And what surprised you most once this moved from idea to real world kitchens?

Olaf van der Veen: 25:19

I wouldn't necessarily call it a surprise because I was ready for it. Still, the magnitude of it was bigger than I expected, which is how much of a bitch reality is. Like you build something, and especially in the hardware domain, you're in their physical spaces and it's, it's humid, it's warm, it's fatty, it's, it's chaotic. And anything, even when it's not in a space like that, even if it's just an a software tool, anything that you build and you feel like you're super proud of it all. We've got all of our bases covered. Your clients will break, within a second. It's the hardest thing in life to make something easy. That's my, statement since it's so hard to make something easy because reality is always different to what you thought it would be and what you can artificially create in your own little confined space. And we couldn't really help that to the, the extent that at some point, somewhere in the world, because we're in 46 different countries. There was literally cockroaches living in our device. You never thought of that problem before. And this kitchen turned out to be infested with cockroaches, like in general. Otherwise they wouldn't live in our device. It's not like our device attracts cockroaches, rest assured. But that's just a problem that we, we literally saw it on our camera that there was a cockroach in front of the camera. We, we told them, and it turned out they had a cockroach infestation. This is the sort of problems you don't think of that'll only surface when you're there. That still surprises me, even though I was ready for it.

Tom Raftery: 26:56

And obviously this isn't happening in a vacuum. You've got other things going on like regulation, reporting, margins, labor pressure, all of it bearing down on kitchens at once. So how much of this shift is being driven, would you say, by economics? And how much? By reporting and regulation?

Olaf van der Veen: 27:16

Until this day, economic 98% and regulations are now coming up.

Tom Raftery: 27:23

Hmm.

Olaf van der Veen: 27:23

So, more and more we see that shift to also be regulation. which we happily provide to our clients, but we always keep challenging our client. We're not your reporting tool. We're a tool that allows you to do reporting, but we're there to help you reduce, whilst you're doing that reporting. And I'm very happy about this dynamic too, because the clients that we built this solution with for the last six years are the clients that were motivated to use this because they chose to do this and they believed in the, in, the sustainability meets profitability angle. So we got to build this with, clients that are motivated. Now, there will be more clients coming in that needs to work with technology like this, even though they really rather not. Now that we've optimised the product and made it perfect for these situations, we can bring it in and then we can make'em excited nonetheless because we're already there it lowered that hurdle. Your very first clients are also the clients that, get to work with the solution. That doesn't work very well just yet because that's prototyping and that's all of the, the, funky stories that I just told you. So compliance is a good driver for us by now, but I'm happy that it wasn't yet the moment we had, we designed this solution,

Tom Raftery: 28:41

And is food waste. Really about food? Or is it a mirror showing how intelligently a system is being run?

Olaf van der Veen: 28:49

It's a good question. I mean again, no one likes to waste food. Especially not the clients that we have because they've become chefs for a reason, right? They that they love food and that's why they decided to become professional cooks. So it is about food. It is indeed also about systems design, but before basically a solution like ours came into market, there was no way to track food waste. So it takes a very committed chef. And I met, luckily I met many, many of them, that in addition to all of the things that you mentioned, margins and, and operational pressure and guest satisfaction, still carved out part of their time to check these food waste levels and, and mitigate them. But all those that didn't, I wouldn't call them dumb or unprofessional, it's just that they didn't have the time and also they didn't have the data. That is literally new. So it was just sheerly impossible to get a grip on that big gaping black hole in your kitchen until now.

Tom Raftery: 29:54

Okay. And looking ahead, what is going to change the game more? Will it be better data, tighter regulations, smarter kitchens, changing consumer expectations, something else entirely?

Olaf van der Veen: 30:08

I'm hopeful for regulations, customer expectations. we can't really wait for those. For us, from my perspective, it is better data quality and more operational grip. What I mean with that, for the last years, we've been focusing on tracking waste to the best possible way, and I think we're succeeding at that. But now we're also working on project combining that data with guest numbers, with procurement figures, with sales figures, with contextual data such as weather and events, getting the best possible digital grip of their operation. Allowing if we have all of those data points for literally forecasting their tomorrows, and I think that is the holy grail. Using our solution, you can significantly reduce your waste levels, like literally up to 70%. The last 30% is also achievable when you really go our demand forecasting system. But in fact, demand forecasting will in parallel also improve your guest satisfaction because you'll be even better at preempting what their wishes are and not on an individual level. They won't be able to tell what Tom Raftery will be eating tonight, but they will sort of in a, the scale in which they operate, say they serve 150 guests, they will know to a very tight margin. With all of those people combined will on average eat on those nights and thus turn out the best possible quality. Absolutely eliminating food based levels. That's what I dream of.

Tom Raftery: 31:36

Hypothetically, you're aware, obviously, if you're buying consumer electronics, that they're graded on an A, B, C, D, E grade for their energy efficiency. What would you think about regulations which required restaurants to measure their. Carbon per plate or carbon per customer or, so I guess the question is a, do you see something like this coming? What would be the metrics they should use? And, you know, would you be in favor of something like that coming out?

Olaf van der Veen: 32:11

I mean, fundamentally I like the idea and, I'm curious if a consumer would literally start looking at their website, what sort of rating they would have before deciding whether or not to eat there? Maybe and, and I'm hopeful that that is true if we are going that way. I think something along the lines of carbon taxing probably more fruitful carbon because it is about carbon emissions and water use and whatever. But, but I think for the food domain, carbon emission and arguably nitrogen emissions are most important. If you're gonna tax those, then implicitly restaurants that do worse will be more expensive, thus less appealing. This, well, it's, it's the same thing that applies to carbon tax all around. That would already implicitly make the good performing restaurants more appealing to guests And then the combination of the two of what you said and what I'm just saying. that would be brilliant.

Tom Raftery: 33:04

Quick lightning round. So, short questions, one sentence answer, fairly straightforward. So first question. Cut waste first or grow revenue first?

Olaf van der Veen: 33:20

Wow, that's deep. That's question for the soul. Grow revenue first.

Tom Raftery: 33:25

Okay. Better planning or more flexibility?

Olaf van der Veen: 33:30

Better planning

Tom Raftery: 33:32

Okay. Standard menus or local freedom?

Olaf van der Veen: 33:37

Local freedom.

Tom Raftery: 33:39

Teach staff more or automate more?

Olaf van der Veen: 33:43

Automate more.

Tom Raftery: 33:45

Okay. Cheap food or honest pricing?

Olaf van der Veen: 33:49

Honest pricing.

Tom Raftery: 33:52

And lastly, what food habit should the industry stop defending?

Olaf van der Veen: 33:56

All round availability everything being available at all times.

Tom Raftery: 34:01

Gotcha. All right. A left field question for you. If you could have any person or character, alive or dead, real or fictional as a champion for reducing food waste, who would it be and why?

Olaf van der Veen: 34:22

Wow. I'd love to have a David Attenborough I love him, but he's not very connected to food waste just yet. Yeah, Anthony Bourdain or Massimo Bottura, the famous Michelin star chef. I think he's got his heart in the right place, and he turns out a super beautiful product. So I'd love to get to know him on this topic. He's also the ambassador for food waste for the UN.

Tom Raftery: 34:43

Oh, okay. Didn't know that. Nice. Very good. Very good. Okay, we're coming towards the end of the podcast now, Olaf. Is there any question that I didn't ask that you wish I had or any aspect of this we haven't touched on that you think it's important for people to be aware of?

Olaf van der Veen: 34:58

I don't believe there is other than, I find it important for people to know this is also lives in your world. Right? So, everyone can start joining the food waste fight tomorrow, just looking at their own waste bin. So I'm, talking to people like yourself, I wanna spread this message far and wide that everyone will be, contributing, which we got some big work to do. We got some make major ground to cover, but, I hope that I get to inspire some people to look at their own behaviors and see how waste reduction can, in fact improve quality.

Tom Raftery: 35:32

Super Olaf. If people would like to know more about yourself or any of the things we talked about on the podcast today, where would you have me direct them?

Olaf van der Veen: 35:40

LinkedIn our website, Orbisk.com that would be the fastest ways to find us.

Tom Raftery: 35:46

Perfect. Great. Olaf, that's been fascinating. Thanks a million for coming on the podcast today.

Olaf van der Veen: 35:51

Thank you Tom.

Tom Raftery: 35:52

Okay, we've come to the end of the show. Thanks everyone for listening. If you'd like to know more about the Climate Confident podcast, feel free to drop me an email to tomraftery at outlook. com or message me on LinkedIn or Twitter. If you like the show, please don't forget to click follow on it in your podcast application of choice to get new episodes as soon as they're published. Also, please don't forget to rate and review the podcast. It really does help new people to find the show. Thanks. Catch you all next time.