There is a well-known problem in corporate sustainability reporting that most organisations prefer not to discuss publicly: the data they report is often less reliable than the reports suggest.
For food waste specifically, this problem is structural. The data originates with the person closest to the food: a kitchen manager at the end of a lunch service. That person is busy, undertrained in data collection, and using a logging method that was probably designed for a different purpose. The data travels upward through account managers and sustainability coordinators, gaining formatting but losing traceability at each step.
The regulatory shift
CSRD applies to large undertakings meeting at least two of three criteria: more than 250 employees, more than €50 million in net turnover, or more than €25 million in total assets. Under ESRS E5, these operators are required to report food waste data with auditor-verifiable accuracy. The operators in scope are exactly the companies that currently have the structural data quality problem described above: Sodexo, Compass Group, ISS Facilities, Aramark, Elior.
The three levels where the problem lives
At kitchen level, the challenge is adoption. Any tool that adds meaningful workload will not be used consistently. Inconsistent use means incomplete data. This is not a training problem. It is a design problem.
At account manager level, the challenge is aggregation. An account manager responsible for twenty sites is collecting data from twenty different people in twenty different formats. Manual consolidation is time-consuming and error-prone.
At portfolio level, the challenge is comparability. A sustainability director looking at data from 50 sites needs to trust that a kg of food waste at Site A means the same thing as at Site B. If different sites use different methods, the portfolio picture is meaningless.
What changes when logging becomes frictionless
Zipli’s hypothesis, validated in the Sodexo Finland pilot, is that all three levels of the problem have the same root cause: the logging tool is not simple enough.
When logging is genuinely simple, kitchen staff use it consistently. When they use it consistently, account managers stop compiling data manually. When data flows automatically from all sites, portfolio-level comparability is a natural output, not a manual exercise.
In the Sodexo pilot, three sites across 21 days generated 81 logged entries and 271 kg of documented surplus. Usage was consistent throughout. Kitchen staff logged in under 30 seconds per entry. The data was visible in the dashboard in real time, comparable across all three sites, without manual intervention.
The data product that catering chains are actually buying
Catering chains are not buying a logging app. They are buying the data that reliable logging produces. The Zipli dashboard provides site-level surplus data, chain-of-custody verification for CSRD audit purposes, and a portfolio-level ESG view that aggregates automatically across all onboarded sites.
The kitchen logging tool is the input mechanism. The data platform is the product.
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References: CSRD ESRS E5, Zipli/Sodexo pilot final report, Testbed Helsinki, June 2026. Read the ESRS E5 framework documentation.
