Adnkronos (Adnkronos) – In Italian primary schools, over a fifth of the food prepared is not consumed, and vegetables and legumes are among the most wasted foods.
On the occasion of the International Day of Awareness of Food Loss and Waste (29 September), and just a few weeks before the return to school, PlanEat, a benefit company founded by Nicola Lamberti that develops solutions for meal planning, is drawing attention to a model that allows children and families to choose in advance what and how much to eat and which also includes the so-called 'taster portion', designed to encourage a more gradual approach to less popular foods, overcoming the logic of the one-size-fits-all portion with a more personalized approach.
Originating with the MenSana pilot project in Borgarello and subsequently extended to other schools in Lombardy and Campania, the model has been adopted over the course of three school years by over 300 students in preschool, elementary school, and middle school. The system allows kitchens to plan service based on actual customer choices, reducing the risk of producing uneaten food.
The most significant results come from Borgarello (Pavia), where a comparison between a week of traditional service and a week managed through the platform highlighted a 52% reduction in wasted food, accompanied by a 20% decrease in overall production and a 35% drop in side dishes.
The most interesting finding concerns the tasting method. In Morra De Sanctis (Avellino), when the same dish was subsequently offered on the menu, 56% of children who had initially chosen a smaller portion requested a larger portion, and in about one in four cases, they went straight for the full portion.
For some foods, such as green salad, herbs, and steamed carrots, tasting also eliminated the waste recorded during the trial. In light of the results, PlanEat proposes that advance meal and portion selection, including tasting, be recognized as a rewarding criterion in school catering tenders. Currently, evaluation systems focus primarily on monitoring and recovering surpluses once they have been generated, while specific recognition for tools that enable them to be prevented through improved service planning is still lacking.
"The real challenge is not to better manage waste once it has already occurred, but to prevent it through more accurate service planning. Today, we know precisely how much food is served, but much less than how much is actually consumed. Technology allows us to anticipate the choices of families and students and transform them into a planning tool for kitchens," explains Nicola Lamberti, founder of PlanEat. "This capability improves service efficiency, reduces unconsumed food, and strengthens the educational function of school canteens. This is why we believe that the advance selection of meals and portions, along with the service's nutritional objectives, should be promoted among the qualifying elements of future school catering tenders." The PlanEat model also introduces a different approach to the traditional recovery of surplus food. The goal is not to recycle leftover food, but to prevent it from being produced unnecessarily. By planning meals and portions in advance, unwanted quantities can be quantified and form the basis for solidarity initiatives inspired by the "Suspended Meal" model, strengthening the link between nutrition education, waste prevention, and social impact. "We talk about waste by counting tons, but the greatest cost we don't measure is the one we pass on. A child who sees food thrown away every day risks considering it normal even as an adult," adds Lamberti. "The school cafeteria is one of the first places where children and young people build their relationship with food. Giving them the opportunity to choose a portion best suited to their needs, or to gradually approach a food through tasting, means turning the cafeteria into an educational as well as nutritional experience."
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