Did you know that about 1.3 billion tons of food is wasted every year? It is worth approximately US$1 trillion.
Among the industries that contribute to the majority of food waste are restaurants. In this article, we will discuss how to reduce food waste in restaurants.
A Simple Guide How To Reducing Food Waste in Restaurants
7 Ways to reducing food waste in restaurants
As more awareness is being spread in regards to the enormous amounts of food wasted each year, most well-known restaurants are putting forth significant effort to reduce food waste.
These restaurants have understood that they can significantly boost their profits simply by reducing their food waste-related expenses.
Here are some of the most common tactics that restaurants deploy to reduce their food wastage footprint.
Let’s take a detailed look.
Calculate food costs and stick to a budget
Budgeting is an important aspect of running any kind of company; be it a restaurant or a five-star resort.
One of the key aspects of creating a budget is that you don’t do it once and forget. Instead, it’s a continuous process that ensures that your production and operational costs are kept under control.
You must maintain track of your food budget in order to make your restaurant profitable. Many entrepreneurs experience anxiety or confusion when dealing with numbers. However, the process does not have to be that tough.
All you need is the right strategy and mindset, and you can monitor your cash flow easily and manage your restaurant budget, giving you peace of mind.
But how do you keep a track of your food production budget?
Well, you can use the food cost percentage calculation to stay on top of things.
So, what exactly is the food cost percentage? It is the ratio of the cost of ingredients (food inventory) to the revenue generated by food sales.
Now that you know how to calculate food cost percentage, let’s explain a bit more about this particular metric.
There’s nothing called an ideal food cost percentage. Depending on the type of food you’re selling, this ratio can be high or low. At the end of the day, your aim should be to stick to a profitable food cost percentage and keep it as low as possible without degrading its quality.
When you keep firm control on your food cost percentage, it’s a given that your staff will be restricted from producing too many food items, which in turn, would keep your food wastage percentage low.
Trim meat and vegetable waste
Try and focus on trimming meat and vegetable waste by all means. Up to 70% of meat and vegetable trimmings waste may be avoided.
According to Winnow’s findings, commercial kitchens have an untapped opportunity to boost product yield by minimizing trimming waste.
Vegetable and fruit trimmings, fish and meat trims, and bakery goods are among the 65 trimmings Winnow’s AI program can recognize. A photo is taken for each recording event as trimmings are dumped into the garbage.
These graphics reveal the potential areas that can help boost product yield. It can help generate new ideas for repurposing certain components or recipes.
This particular practice can result in considerable kitchen cost reductions.
Ensure proper food storage
Now that you have put a limit on the ingredients and the amounts to buy, it’s time to ensure proper storage. Here are a few things to consider:
- Your freezers should operate at the correct temperature
- Maintain a clean and tidy food storage area
- Store low-risk foods on higher shelves
It’s critical to store foods in the right conditions to preserve their quality and avoid harmful bacterial growth, both of which can contribute to food waste.
It’s time to rethink how you organize buffets
We get it!
Buffets are the lifeline of your food business and many people mostly come to your restaurant just because you offer an “all-you-can-eat” facility. However, most of these buffets end up wasting tons of food every year because people can’t eat unlimited amounts of food even if it’s available for free.
As a restaurant owner, if you wish to reduce your food wastage footprint, you need to reimagine your buffet strategy. Even some minor modifications can make a great difference when it comes to reducing consumer plate waste.
Where do you start?
The simplest way to reduce food wastage in a buffet is to use induction warmers. These machines ensure that food items remain warm for a longer period. Also, you can display less food on the buffet by using shallow trays so that the food needs to be restocked more often. As a result, it would remain fresh for an extended period.
Consequently, you wouldn’t have an excuse to throw away a few dishes because they’ve turned cold. With induction warmers, the instance of food turning cold would be virtually impossible.
Now, we all know that people usually overfill their plates in buffets, but eventually, they’re unable to finish what they started.
A way to reduce this wastage would be to lower the size of plates available in the buffet. Smaller plates would encourage people to take smaller serving sizes, which would potentially reduce a massive amount of waste over time.
Also, one common mistake buffet organizers make that lead to more food wastage is they keep their buffet open throughout the day (or at least for most of the day). You need not keep your buffet open all of the time. Instead, try to alter the hours to coincide with prime mealtimes. This will certainly ensure that food isn’t wasted.
Keep a track of food wastage
Now this one is a no-brainer, yet many restaurant owners don’t conduct this exercise very often. Always keep track of consumption.
If your restaurant doesn’t keep an eye on things, it would end up with a lot of food waste without you even realizing it.
In worse scenarios, if you fail to keep track of inventories and alter orders as needed, you will almost certainly lose money on a regular basis.
Restaurants must double down their tracking efforts and get specialized employees on board who know how to minimize food waste.
It’s a given that some food waste is impossible to quantify. However, when your kitchen personnel ensure documenting how much of each product is thrown away and why, it would certainly give you something to work with.
Of course, these detailed tracking efforts take time, but they are well worth the effort. The key here is to understand the core reason for food waste.
When you have the right kind of data at your disposal, you can implement appropriate strategies to reduce wastage.
Donate any leftover food
No matter what precautions you take and how rigorous strategies you implement, there would still be some amount of food waste.
Even if you’re serving precise quantities of food items, customers might not be able to complete their meal.
As a restaurant owner, you would want to have as few leftovers as possible, but you will eventually have some. So, it’s worth researching alternatives to tossing them out. But, what to do in such scenarios?
If you take lessons from the premier restaurants around the globe that have been taking special initiatives to reduce food waste, you also can successfully reduce your wastage footprint. Some of the major restaurants have designed a “food rescue” program.
In such a program, the extra banquet food is donated to charities. You can adopt such a policy.
Invest in functional and useful equipment
We believe that you have come across the idea that “charity begins at home”. This philosophy works almost in all aspects of life. When it comes to the food business and reducing wastage, “food waste reduction starts in your kitchen.”
Every restaurant should invest in smart kitchen equipment. Thanks to the availability of cutting-edge technology, as a restaurant owner, you can ensure that food is not thrown out unnecessarily.
But how can you prevent wastage?
Well, you can invest in worthy AI programs, such as Winnow Vision. Winnow Vision’s food waste management technology is more accurate than humans at detecting waste and has been verified to ensure data quality.
Winnow Vision’s food recognition system recognizes wasted food items automatically after a period of training and becomes smarter as more image data is collected into the food waste management technology.
When recognition capability is enabled, consumers are just required to confirm the proposed food, resulting in a semi automatic condition. This eliminates error rates and saves time at the same time.
Leaders in the industry, Sands China Ltd. are doubling down against food waste following a successful reduction programme powered by Winnow which reduced waste levels by over 60%. The project was a perfect marriage of people power and technology, with teams adopting new Artificial Intelligence technology, Winnow Vision, to measure and manage waste.
Take collaborative actions to build a better world
All of the food that is produced but never consumed is enough to feed two billion people.
That’s more than twice the number of individuals that are malnourished around the world. This fact alone should be enough to persuade you to take adequate action to reduce food wastage.
We believe that following our guide will help you significantly reduce the amount of food wasted in your restaurant.
Author bio
Atreyee Chowdhury is a freelance content writer with more than 10+ years of professional experience. She is passionate about helping SMBs and enterprises achieve their content marketing goals with her carefully crafted and compelling content.
She loves to read, travel, and experiment with different cuisines in her free time. You can follow her on LinkedIn.
