Winnow wins prize for reducing waste in Spain with Heineken and ISS Facility Services

Winnow are proud to win the Sisifo Prize 2019, a prize awarded in Madrid, Spain, for our work reducing food waste with services firm ISS Facility Services and their client Heineken. 

The prize is awarded by the association ‘Restaurantes Sostenibles’, who bring together people and organisations sharing similar principles of sustainable development in hospitality.

This award is recognition of Winnow’s partnership with ISS and Heineken that began in 2019, and contributes to Heineken’s broader work to reduce emissions throughout their operations. Since 2008, Heineken Spain have successfully reduced emissions by 60%, and continue to utilize new technology like artificial intelligence to achieve this.

Driving the food waste reduction project at Heineken Spain is Fernando Lallana, Workplace Services Manager. Upon receiving the award, he noted: 

“In our country, Heineken Spain has been the first FMCG company and the first brewer using this technology, and the results are a resounding success: in just five months we have saved 660kg of wasted food. Or, put another way, 1.650 meals and 3 tonnes of CO2 saved.”

Heineken and ISS are the first catering operation in Spain to use Winnow to reduce food waste, and these promising initial results suggests there is a clear business case to cut costs and do the right thing by the environment. 

Mr Lallana continues by saying there is further possibility for additional success in the future:

“If we confirm this success, our goal is to start campaigns to create consciousness in our employees about changing behaviours when ordering food so they order just what is needed. Continuous iteration with them on this will help us all on investigating what drivers and levers can be pushed to reduce even more on the customer side”.

Managing the catering operation for Heineken Spain is ISS Facility Services. The ISS team seamlessly began using the Winnow system and integrating new insight into daily practices to achieve strong results.

During his presentation, Josep Llovera Montserrat, Service Excellence Director at ISS Facility Services in Iberia said the partnership with Winnow was key to truly achieve significant food waste reductions.

“If we wish to reduce food waste, we must fully understand the size of the problem within our kitchens and that means we have to measure the volume of waste. From this scientific method, we have the right tools at our disposal to make decisions within the kitchen that  result in positive reductions for our client Heineken”.

Winnow’s Business Development lead in Spain, Constance Lambert, says this award underlines the appetite in Spain for food waste solutions: “As an issue in Spain, food waste is increasingly becoming a bigger issue. I’m really thrilled for the team at both Heineken and ISS Spain to be recognised for their leadership in reducing food waste. Both teams are committed to having a positive impact on climate change and we are very proud to help them achieve their goals.”

In Spain nationally, there is still a lot of work to do however. As noted in the newspaper El Pais, Spain are a long way from meeting their 2030 commitment to halve food waste. In 2018, Spanish homes threw away over 1.4 billion kilos/liters of food, an increase of 8.9% from 2017.