When facilities managers look for operational savings, they typically focus on HVAC systems, lighting, water usage, and preventive maintenance. These systems generate continuous streams of data, making it easier to identify inefficiencies and measure improvements over time. Commercial kitchens, however, have historically operated with far less operational visibility, despite being among the most resource-intensive spaces in a facility.
That gap is becoming harder to ignore. According to IFMA’s 2026 AI & Digitalization in Facilities Management Report, one in five facilities managers identified rising energy costs as their biggest operational challenge. As organizations search for new ways to improve efficiency while meeting sustainability goals, every major operation inside the building deserves closer attention, including foodservice.
Data Has Transformed Buildings. Kitchens Are Next.
Over the past decade, facilities management has become increasingly data-driven. Building automation systems monitor energy consumption, HVAC performance, occupancy, lighting, and equipment health in real time, allowing facilities teams to identify problems before they become expensive repairs. Predictive maintenance and connected building technologies have fundamentally changed how buildings are managed.
Commercial kitchens have not experienced the same transformation. Many operations still rely on manual production logs, visual estimates, and end-of-day reporting to understand what happened during service. If a dining operation throws away 40 pounds of prepared food after lunch, managers know food was wasted. The impact of this waste is far beyond the cost of the food. There are the cost of human labor and the energy spent in preparation, and the cost for managing the food waste. These costs are significant but may not always be visible to the facilities management functions.
Foodservice operators often cannot determine why the waste happened. Was too much being prepared for? Did customer demand change unexpectedly? Has the same menu item been consistently overproduced every Tuesday for the past month? Without reliable operational data, improving performance often becomes an exercise in educated guesswork.
Artificial intelligence (AI) is beginning to change that by helping organizations collect operational data automatically as food moves through the life cycle from production to service. Instead of simply measuring what was discarded, facilities and foodservice teams can better understand the factors contributing to overproduction, creating opportunities to improve purchasing, labor planning, and daily operations to prevent food waste at the earliest point possible.
Food Waste Is More Than a Foodservice Problem
Food waste is often discussed as a sustainability issue simply from the perspective of food supply. For facilities managers, it is equally an operational issue. Every pound of food that is unnecessarily prepared represents electricity used for refrigeration and cooking, water consumed during preparation and cleaning, staff labor, and the cost of waste removal. Reducing unnecessary production doesn’t just lower food costs; it helps reduce resource consumption across the entire facility.
The environmental impact is equally significant. According to the United Nations Environment Programme’s Food Waste Index Report 2024, the world wasted an estimated 1.05 billion tonnes of food in 2022, representing nearly one-fifth of all food available to consumers. That wasted food also represents enormous amounts of energy, water, and greenhouse gas emissions. For universities, hospitals, senior living communities, and corporate campuses, improving kitchen operations can support both financial performance and broader ESG objectives.
The Next Smart Building System
Facilities management has evolved from maintaining buildings to continuously optimizing them. Today’s buildings automatically adjust lighting based on occupancy, detect equipment failures before they occur, and provide real-time visibility into energy performance. The next opportunity is applying that same operational mindset to commercial kitchens.
The goal is not simply to add another dashboard or automate another task. It is to provide facilities leaders with better information so they can make better operational decisions. As IFMA’s Facility Management Journal has observed, AI is increasingly helping facilities professionals move beyond monitoring systems to making faster, more informed decisions. Commercial kitchens deserve to be part of that conversation because they influence energy use, labor efficiency, sustainability, and operating costs every day.
Facilities managers have spent years making buildings smarter. The next opportunity may be making one of the building’s most complex environments just as intelligent. Bringing AI into the commercial kitchen gives facilities teams greater visibility into an operation that affects food costs, labor, energy use, waste, and sustainability every day. As facilities management continues to embrace AI, the commercial kitchen should become part of the strategy.
Fengmin Gong is the CEO and co-Founder of Metafoodx, an AI kitchen intelligence company helping commercial foodservice operators improve operational efficiency, reduce overproduction, and support sustainability through data-driven decision-making.