The Cost Savings of Food Sustainability

[00:00:00] Calan Breckon: Today’s episode is sponsored by Make.com, the Automation and development platform that helps you harness the full power of AI. I’ve been using make because it’s hands down the easiest way to automate the boring, repetitive tasks in my business without needing to know how to code or over complicate things. Make uses a super simple drag and drop visual builder which lets me connect all the different apps that I use to create workflows and saves me so much time. Honestly, it feels like having a virtual assistant running in the background 24-7.

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[00:01:03] Calan Breckon: Welcome to the business gay podcast where we talk about all things business, marketing and entrepreneurship. I’m your host Calan Breckon and on today’s episode I have the founder and CEO of BetterTable™, Ben Liegey. BetterTable™ is a Vancouver based benefits company empowering kitchens to boost profits, cut food waste in half and achieve net zero emissions. Ben has over 10 years experience in food sustainability and in 2024 he was named one of Business in Vancouver’s 40 under 40 at this year’s CGLCC summit. Ben also won the 2025 Emerging Exporter of the Year award as well as the EY Pitch Competition in partnership with Canada’s 2SLGBTQI+ Chamber of Commerce. I’m excited to chat about sustainability today with Ben, so let’s jump in.

Welcome to the show Ben. How are you doing?

[00:01:54] Ben Liegey: Thank you so much, Calan for having me. I’m doing great in here.

[00:01:57] Calan Breckon: Good. I’m super excited we could finally get you on the show, especially hot off the heels of your two wins at the CGLCC summit, which is absolutely phenomenal, which we’re going to talk a little bit more about. But how did that feel when. When you won?

[00:02:14] Ben Liegey: Yeah, it was amazing. Actually felt unexpected because there were so many amazing entrepreneurs, you know, who were having amazing ideas. So still very rewarding. But I’m grateful to be part of this community of change makers.

[00:02:29] Calan Breckon: Nice. Well, you’re doing really, really good work and so. All right, so let’s start here because you’re in like sustainability and waste and food. So I want to start off with just some curiosities that I have. Do you have any like, shocking statistics that like people might not know about food, food waste that they’ll be like, oh my God, yeah, absolutely.

[00:02:51] Ben Liegey: I mean, in Canada, like 58 of food produced is wasted across the whole food supply chain. It’s more than $50 billion per year just in Canada alone.

So it’s a huge amount of money in terms of like also the carbon emissions. You know, it’s like it’s estimated to be 8 to 10% of global climate change is food waste.

So it’s a lot.

[00:03:17] Calan Breckon: Oh my God. Sorry. You said 53 is wasted?

[00:03:22] Ben Liegey: Yeah, I mean like the estimation are like decreasing a little bit, but it’s around half. Yeah, Half of our food is being wasted.

[00:03:30] Calan Breckon: There’s no reason there should be starvation in the world.

It makes me so angry.

Okay. Oh, okay, let’s get it. We’re gonna get into the business side of it. But like, oh my God, that makes me ang.

Um, okay, so you’re a sustainable business. How do you balance that kind of sustainability goals with the realities of running a business? Because we live in this reality of like, okay, we want to be sustainable, but then money’s king, which I hate, but money is king. And so how do you kind of balance that spot where you’re trying to be sustainable, but there are realities of running a business.

[00:04:09] Ben Liegey: Yeah, for sure. So I started my career in sustainability consulting like back in 2010, now back in Europe where I was born. And I tackled because sustainability, it’s a big like issue, you know that so many different aspects of sustainability that you could look at.

If you look at the example for a hotel, for example, if you work on energy efficiency like you, it costs you money. You would, but you will get that money back. But it will take a few years. Right. So there is an initial investment.

If you want to be like sustainable on your. The soap you have like when you take your shower, you know, at the hotel. Yes. Having eco friendly like shampoo or soaps will be better, of course, but it will cost you more money. Right.

Like with food waste prevention, what I really like is that it’s a way to have a triple bottom line where you can save money, save the planet and have a positive social impact at the same time. So. So it’s really about having the understanding of the opportunity and then implementing the best practices that already exist.

[00:05:20] Calan Breckon: Yeah, so you, you touched a little bit on like, like kind of measuring a metric. So what are the metrics that matter the most to you when you’re measuring either BetterTable’s™ impact or the impact of the organization that you’re working with?

[00:05:35] Ben Liegey: Yeah, so in terms of impact metrics, there are different metrics we track, of course. There is the economic metrics in terms of food costs saved, which is very important. It can be around like $10,000 per year for some of the businesses we’ve worked with.

Then there is the environmental metrics more on like food waste reduction or in terms of food, like in terms of climate impact, like how you’ve been reducing your carbon emissions related to food, which is sometimes not really thought about.

People who are tracking carbon emissions, they usually focus on energy and transportation without thinking about food, that food is one third of climate change.

And then on the social, it’s about meals saved. And we also track, you know, like the, all the impact around the Sustainable Development Goals.

We want to be able, especially in the app we are working on, we want to be able to be able to have a quantitative impact of your operations across the 17 Sustainable Development Goals from the United Nations.

[00:06:50] Calan Breckon: Okay, so you just mentioned the app. Tell us a little bit more about that.

[00:06:55] Ben Liegey: Yeah, sure. So historically we’ve been performing food audits in person and we clearly understood it’s not a scalable model.

It takes a lot of time to go, you know, take 12 hour travel there to food and beverage operations and.

And yeah, so it takes a lot of time. So the idea would be to have an app that will help you automate the food audit process to be able to get the results you’ll get when we are on site without having us to be there and to make it better, cheaper and faster and being able to quantify your impacts on the 17 Sustainable Development Goals.

[00:07:40] Calan Breckon: Okay, so it’s like a tracker app that helps an organization, like a restaurant or something that wants to work with you, but you just don’t have the people power capacity to go through and do all that and to put all those numbers together to help them get a little bit further and where they’re going.

[00:07:56] Ben Liegey: Absolutely, yeah.

[00:07:57] Calan Breckon: Nice. And you’ve also kind of created like a couple other things. Like you have an academy and a card game. How do you make sure that these are like actually working inside of like busy kitchens? Because they’re great to have, but to actually like have people go through those things or to utilize those tools. How have you been like how has the response been to them?

[00:08:19] Ben Liegey: Yeah, so of course time is key in food and depression. Like chefs don’t have a Lot of time to. To.

To. Yeah, to. They have a lot of things to do.

And so for the academy, we designed it to be very like time efficient.

So it takes only one hour to complete online, including the, the test. So if you can have an overview of best practices and we find it, the most helpful is to do that before we do an audit so that the whole team is on, is aware of best practices. Kind of the same way you would require to have food safe, you would make sure that your team has basic food safety skills. It’s kind of the, the same but for food efficiency, to make sure the whole team has food efficiency skills. And it can be done like you know, 24 7. You can, you don’t need to have the whole team attending one meeting which is, which will never happen because of everyone’s conflicting agendas. Right.

So yeah, that’s on the academy side, the vegetable academy. And for the card game, actually I have one here.

[00:09:32] Calan Breckon: Oh, nice.

[00:09:33] Ben Liegey: Perfect. You have like different. So you have like food, food and beverage cards, marketing cards, culinary cards, HR cards.

It’s asking you questions that’s you may not think about. It’s not prescriptive, it won’t tell you do this, do that. But it will make you think in a different way that you may not have thought about. And it’s to answer your question around how I make sure it fits into a busy schedule for, for people in the kitchen, you could just take one card, play 10 seconds and get value out of it. Or you could do like a whole like three hour workshop, including the different teams and switch roles. Like you know, if you’re a chef, you could take a chef card. But then what if you were like a, if you had a marketing hat, what kind of question you could bring and maybe have a different perspective and you, you would bring more innovative solutions to, to the kitchen.

[00:10:34] Calan Breckon: Definitely. So do you have any like success stories of working with any organizations? Whether you can name them or not, that’s totally okay.

But like any big success stories to share? Like, you know, this is where they started and then this is where they are now?

[00:10:50] Ben Liegey: Yeah, absolutely. We have a lot of testimonials on our website, BetterTable™.com but we’ve been targeting many independent hotels and upscale hotels, namely from the Marriott Group.

And just to give you an example, like some of our clients, they’ve been reducing food waste by 30% in just six months, saving like $20,000 annually.

So that’s the kind of impact we can have.

[00:11:22] Calan Breckon: That’s a lot of money to be saving Especially in this economy, in the world that we’re in right now, it’s really important that you know, entrepreneurs and I, I assume these kind of more privately owned, other than Marriott, but more privately owned smaller companies. Like that’s going to really affect the bottom dollar of hotels, hotel, restaurants and that kind of a thing.

[00:11:42] Ben Liegey: Yeah, absolutely. Especially now with food costs rising. You know, I’m sure you’ve experienced going dining out is getting more and more expensive and yet restaurant cannot increase menu prices so they the profit margin is getting smaller and smaller. So it’s even more important even if you don’t care about the sustainability story and impact just on the bottom line, it just makes sense.

[00:12:05] Calan Breckon: Yeah, because it’s a way for you to increase your bottom line, like increase your money intake without actually having to pass those costs on to, you know, the consumer. Because everybody passes the costs off to the consumer. We’re getting a little tired of it.

So you’re a certified CGLCC organization, much like myself. How has been being certified as a diverse business with the CGLCC opened up new doors for you?

[00:12:37] Ben Liegey: Yeah, I think it’s like in different ways. Like one would be around the community like meeting different people, share common challenges and being able to, to have those connections and a stronger network. I think that’s key to really build your network and not only where you live, but really across the country.

Also the trade mission, actually that’s how we met in Palm Spring for one of the trade missions in Palm Spring. I think that’s also a really cool way to think about exporting your solutions.

And of course it takes time to build those relationships. So it’s not you just go to a trade mission and it’s done, but it’s about, you know, like building this relationship with companies and, and yeah just like creating these reports over time and going to. So that has been very helpful to, to, to go and to be able to talk to people I would never been able to talk to like you know, like people in the US from my Sodexo or Google that that would, that’s a great opportunities to, to connect for sure.

And also in terms of mentorship, like I been part of the mentorship program with CGLCC and I had an amazing mentor and really grateful for, for all the lessons and, and accountability both took to me.

[00:14:09] Calan Breckon: Yeah, definitely. I think so for those listening. So Ben and I have gone on the trade missions together to Palm Springs. I’ve also done Denver. I think that was the year before.

And it’s a connection with the NGLCC, which is the sister organization down in the U.S. which is their National LGBTQ Chamber of Commerce. We have the CGLCC up here in Canada. And it really puts you in rooms with folks that you never would be in a room with otherwise.

Um, and it really prioritizes that. And so it gives a little. It helps open the door to those spaces. Because I personally, I didn’t go to university, so I didn’t have that kind of built in network that a lot of people who go to like college or university have that network in their, you know, study choice area where they can like call a friend or. Oh, I know this person over here, that person over there, which has been really great. And, and being part of the CGLC mentorship program, I also went through it, I think in 2022, 2023.

Absolutely. Great program continues to get better. And I know, I think that they are open. It’s the summertime and this is coming out in the summertime. And I think that they’re opening. I think they might be closing it maybe end of July, August.

[00:15:23] Ben Liegey: Yeah, it’s around that time.

[00:15:25] Calan Breckon: Yeah. And then it starts in September. So if you’re listening to this, go check out the cglcc.ca website to see if they have spots still open for the mentorship program. Because I. It’s a phenomenal program. I’m. I’m considering. I’m thinking of being a mentor this year.

We’ll see. I think I have until August to decide, but now that I said on the podcast, I probably have to do it.

Okay. I want to wrap things up kind of with like sustainability tips that you can leave folks with. Whether, you know, let’s. Let’s start off in restaurant settings or like hotel restaurant settings, and then we’ll do ones for like the regular everyday person. So. So sustainability tips for a restaurant or like a big hotel or something like that.

[00:16:11] Ben Liegey: Yeah. So, like, I would say like three things that comes to mind. Like, one is around training, making sure your whole teams have the basic food waste rention skills and food sustainability skills.

Second would be around tracking, making sure you understand what’s going on and to be able to take decision based on data and not based on I don’t know what’s going on in my kitchen kind of thing.

And the third would be just be creative with your ingredients and push beyond the boundaries of what you think you can do with whatever food or trimming you have. You can really explore.

Amazing, tasty recipe that I’ve shared with many people and it’s been fantastic.

[00:16:58] Calan Breckon: Nice. And what about like the individuals who are listening who aren’t part of the restaurateur world but they want to participate in sustainability in their own homes.

[00:17:08] Ben Liegey: Yeah. So definitely making sure to understand what kind of ingredients goes in the fridge or outside of the fridge because some will last longer in that way.

Another thing is like for example, apples and Dianas will ripen faster if they are like close to together. So like kind of on the spoilage kind of thing.

And also like be creative with your, you know, the ingredients. And like I always take the example. I make an amazing banana peel bread.

So it’s about thinking what you can do with what you would normally consider waste but thinking in a creative way to be able to.

Yeah. To have an impact. And also when you go out to a restaurant, just bring or to a friend’s party, just bring your container. There is always leftover to bring back.

[00:17:57] Calan Breckon: Yes, there’s always, there’s always leftovers. I always have friends being like, take this here, we got too much.

That’s amazing. Well, thank you so much, Ben. Where can folks go to find out more about BetterTable™ connect with you and find out all that good stuff.

[00:18:15] Ben Liegey: Yeah. So BetterTable™ best is to go on our website, bettertable.com if you’re more in the restaurant side of things. We are launching our app later this year. So if you want to get to know when we’ll be live, the best way is bettertable.com app.

And if you just want to learn more about cool stories around food, food sustainability and food waste prevention, I also work on a documentary about food waste solution. It’s called Food Synergy Movie CA and that’s a cool story about many different organization entrepreneurs fighting food wastes across the whole food supply chain.

[00:18:59] Calan Breckon: Nice. Awesome. I’ll make sure to have all those links in the show notes as well as your LinkedIn to make sure people can connect with you directly.

Thank you so much for being a guest on the show today, Ben. This has been delightful.

[00:19:10] Ben Liegey: Thank you so much Calan for the work you do.

[00:19:12] Calan Breckon: Thanks for tuning in today. Don’t forget to hit that subscribe button. And if you really enjoyed today’s episode, I would love a star rating from you. The Business Gay podcast is written, produced and edited by me, Calan Breckon. That’s it for today. Peace, love, rainbows.