Eliminating waste is the holy grail of the foodservices business—but most companies err by focusing their energies only on eliminating food waste.

According to Salaria and Beth Hoffer, Vice President of Operations and Foodservice of Weigel’s convenience stores during Part 2 of the podcast series, companies should look beyond just traditional “food” waste. The remedy is to reduce waste by minimizing variability in business processes and creating a continuous flow between each step. Salaria and Hoffer follow the Lean Six Sigma methodology, which categories eight types of waste: defects, overproduction, waiting, nonutilized talent, transportation, inventory, motion, and extra-processing.

At Weigel’s, for example, Hoffer and her team focused on understanding the precise physical “movement” of employees. That meant asking themselves hard questions. What tools are necessary to make a pizza? How often do workers need to shift from one place to another to complete their task? What changes could be made to the physical kitchen layout to increase efficiency?

In Salaria’s experience, the waste of “overprocessing” can be just as costly as an inefficient kitchen design. In one example, kitchen employees of a fast-casual chain were “pre-portioning” roughly five to six ounces of french fries for each order from a five-pound bag. While well-intentioned, this work was wasting precious employee time. The more efficient solution, Salaria said, was to give workers a five-ounce measuring scoop and have them process orders in real time.

“Retailers should always look upstream to their suppliers—to work with them to package and ship the product in a manner that’s optimal for their kitchen and their work design,” Salaria said.