March 27, 2025

During 2024, the Centre de Recerca en Economia i Desenvolupament Agroalimentari (CREDA) promoted a series of internal projects to encourage its own initiatives. SWIFT-CARE is one of these initiatives that aims to analyse food waste in hospitals, taking into account all stages of the meal, in order to propose interventions that can reduce it. Within the project, CREDA is in charge of quantifying the total amount of food wasted, both before and after the interventions.

Tianyu Zhang Yin, a PhD student at the centre and responsible for driving the project forward, explains where SWIFT-CARE stands:

What is CREDA’s current status in the project?

Currently, CREDA is analysing the data collected during the second quantification. Once the results are determined, the centre’s team will be able to determine whether the interventions implemented at the hospital have been effective in reducing food waste.

During the total quantification, Tianyu, along with a team of volunteers, have measured the volume of unused food within the Vall d’Hebron Hospital in Barcelona, ​​from the leftovers in the kitchen (food cooked but not served) to the food not consumed by patients.

To do this, the team quantified an entire week’s worth of food for the three main meals: breakfast, lunch, and dinner. The process was divided into two parts:

• Leftover kitchen food: Weight of all gourmets with leftover food in the kitchen.
• Patient surplus food: 100 trays were selected by diet type to determine the sample. The food on the trays was classified by food type, and once the food from all the trays was separated, the total weight was determined by food type. This information was extrapolated to the entire hospitalized population to determine total waste.

Once this task is completed and the figures are analysed, the SWIFT-CARE project will come to an end, leaving the hospital in charge of the final implementation of this and other interventions.