1. The first idea for waste that we thought about was the amount of food that is not eaten but taken out of the cafeteria area. When looking at the revolving trays, many plates still have a large amount of food left on them. This on top of nationwide food waste numbers increasing every year, we need to be able to decrease our own school's food waste. We could collect this data by following a student and recording how much food is put on their plate compared to how much is left when they are done eating. After doing this with a large enough sample size we could figure out some numbers to how much school wide food we are wasting.
2. Our second idea was to check the amount of food waste the cafeteria makes everyday. Not all food is taken off of each serving tray, causing food to be thrown out without ever being put on a plate. We believe that recording the amount of food cooked compared to amount left over could create data to show if the cafeteria staff is overcooking food on a given day.
3. Our last idea is to check and see if different types of food are wasted more than others. We believe that specific food types are wasted more than others inside of our school. To test this we would follow the food itself instead of the consumers. By recording the amount of food cooked to amount of food left over for each different type of food we could find if there is a correlation between food waste and food type.
Step 2: Meeting with 63's manager
The manager of 63's wanted to see the amount of food waste that is created within one hour of the lunch rush at 63s. This falls in line with out first pre-meeting idea, except she only wanted data on amount of food wasted, in pounds, instead of percentage of food cooked to food wasted. Our idea for collecting data is to take the amount of food waste in pounds every fifteen minutes over the course of the hour. This will not only give us the total food waste in the hour, by adding all the four sections up, but also if there is a specific time in the hour that more people are wasting food than others. On top of this, because we are being given the number of people who will be clocking into 63s, we could also roughly plot the amount of food waste per person, in pounds.
Hypothetical Plot
Step 4: Data Analysis v.1
Our initial data analysis shows evidence counter to what we believed would happen in our Hypothetical plot. Firstly, we believed that 46 pounds of food would be wasted within the hour we recorded. In the end we only got 15.5 pounds of waste. Many things could be the result of this, but during the test we noticed that the dining hall was very empty the entire time. Also, we believed that food waste would increase closer to either 12:30 or 1:00pm as people would have to start heading to class. Our actual data shows that more waste was thrown away at 12:00 and 12:45pm. We also recorded the amount of cleared plates to full plates. While we didn't check the amount of plates that went through overall, it trended there was an almost equal number of plates full of food to plates completely cleared.
Final Graph of Data
Cleared Plates vs Full Plates
I like your initial ideas and how it matched with Kayla's request. Your initial plot and analyzed plot were good. Try to think how you can correlate full and cleared plates with time and #people. I loved the fact that you estimated the weight of wasted food from Kayla's statement (1100 lbs/2 days).
ReplyDeleteWhile we did record the amount of full plates and cleared plates, we didn't record the amount of plates with some food waste left. Along with this, we didn't record the amount of people who went into just our end of the food waste section of 63's. The number given to us for the amount of people who went into 63's between 12-1, 163 people, also doesn't help us for similar reasons. These things sadly cause us to not be able to create any important correlations between the number of full plates and cleared plates. If we did have these references in data, we would be able to very clearly gain an understanding how how much food waste is averaged on plates.
DeleteI really was impressed with how organized this is, it is easy to understand and I'm sure will prove as a valuable piece of information for 63s management
ReplyDeleteWhat about a waste in drinks? Also what was the most wasted food of the day if you can remember that if not it fine.
ReplyDeleteFor waste in drinks, we had that all in with the food waste. So while we don't have individual numbers for the amount of wasted drinks, it is apart of our overall food waste numbers. For the most amount of wasted food for the day, it may not have been the most in weight, but many plates had left over mashed potatoes.
Deletewhat caused to make your hypothetical plot the way you did?
ReplyDeleteI like how thorough you guys were while collecting the data. Did you ever get to see if there was one food wasted more than any other?
ReplyDeleteWhat is considered a full plate, how much food is need to be on the plate? Your blog was very organized and gave very good information.
ReplyDeleteWe considered full plates to be plates that had enough food still left on it to cover more than 3/4's the surface. This did not include left over dressing or similar items. All full plates that we recorded had enough food waste to be considered a medium sized meal.
DeleteDo those numbers include drinks and bowls.
ReplyDeleteI liked how organized your data is, and I think it was good that you dropped trying to find the food wasted/food cooked ratio, because that can be found with other methods and it would have involved intervening on other people's days in 63s. What do you think specifically caused the data collected to be different from your hypothesis though?
ReplyDeleteThere was a very small number of people who came through 63's during the time we were stationed to record food waste. On top of this, our theorized numbers was for the entire amount of food waste in the given hour did not take into account that there are two locations to place food waste within 63's. From my limited knowledge of the other group's numbers for the amount of collected food waste, combining our two numbers would be much closer to our hypothetical numbers for amount of food waste.
Deletewow that was a lot of wasted food in such a short amount of time, but was this data recorded at both trash areas or just one?
ReplyDeleteAre drinks included in the data?
ReplyDelete