Leijona Catering Oy is a Finnish catering company whose primary client is the Finnish Armed Forces. As part of its effort to promote sustainability, the company strives to reduce food waste. When the company began using CGI Waste Manager, which is part of the CGI Aromi solution portfolio, it was able to drive significant cost savings across the food service chain.

Leijona Catering prepares more than 70,000 meals per day in the garrisons of the Finnish Armed Forces. In the Armoured Brigade in Parola alone, the company prepares 6,000 meals each week. Because its production volumes are so high, reducing food waste delivers significant financial and environmental benefits.

In addition to waste generated by diners, the company experiences food waste when preparing and serving food. Leijona Catering decided to solve the problem by implementing CGI Waste Manager in 2016. Since then, it has rolled out the solution in all of its cafeterias.

“In 2016, the amount of biowaste in Leijona Catering’s facilities was 2 million kilograms [2,000 tons],” said Petri Hoffren, Leijona Catering’s Business Director. “There is no point in preparing food that ends up in waste bins, so we wanted to change course and start promoting sustainability by reducing food waste.”

Objectives achieved quickly

With the user-friendly CGI Aromi’s Waste Manager solution, it is possible to monitor food waste amounts in kilograms, as well as food waste costs on a real-time basis. Gathering information via a cloud service is easy and quick, and the data applies to and benefits other areas of the organization.

Using CGI Waste Manager drives cost savings for Leijona Catering since personnel, waste management and raw material costs have decreased. In the Parola garrison, for example, the amount of food waste decreased by an incredible 36% within 3 months after the deployment of Waste Manager.

“We use the application with tablet computers to monitor food waste amounts and costs,” said Elvina Kahila, who manages the Parola garrison restaurant. “The application is very easy to use and can be customized to meet our needs.”

Cost savings are not the only important benefit for Leijona Catering; sustainability also is a key company value. It uses CGI Waste Manager to monitor sources of biowaste, collecting essential information to help drive sustainability.

“We have gained significant benefits since we started using the Waste Manager application,” said Petri Hoffen. “We were able to cut the amount of biowaste by almost 10% during the first year of deployment and these significant reductions continue,” he noted.

Benefits of CGI Waste Manager

Makes food waste data gathering and food waste reduction easy and efficient

  • Reduces raw material and waste management costs, as well as greenhouse gas emissions
  • Drives operational improvements through collected data
  • Promotes sustainability by providing measured data to be used when reporting and communicating on environmental issues

“The amount of biowaste was reduced by almost 10% during the first year.” Petri Hoffren Business Director Leijona Catering Oy