Hospital Food Management: a Multi-Objective Approach to Reduce Waste and Costs.

Food waste contributes significantly to greenhouse emissions and represents a substantial portion of overall waste within hospital facilities. Furthermore, uneaten food leads to a diminished nutritional intake for patients, that typically are vulnerable and ill. Therefore, this study developed mathematical models for constructing patient meals in a 1000-bed hospital located in Florida. The objective is to minimize food waste and mealbuilding costs while ensuring that the prepared meals meet the required nutrients and caloric content for patients. To accomplish these objectives, four mixed-integer programming models were employed, incorporating binary and continuous variables. The first model establishes a baseline for how the system currently works. This model generates the meals without minimizing waste or cost. The second model minimizes food waste, reducing waste up to 22.53 % compared to the baseline. The third model focuses on minimizing meal-building costs and achieves a substantial reduction of 37 %. Finally, a multi-objective optimization model was employed to simultaneously reduce both food waste and cost, resulting in reductions of 19.70 % in food waste and 32.66 % in meal-building costs. The results demonstrate the effectiveness of multi-objective optimization in reducing waste and costs within large-scale food service operations.