Reducing food waste in restaurants should be a top priority for owners. Your commitment to waste reduction offers:
- Immediate cost-savings
- Less impact on the environment
- Higher profit margins
How can restaurants reduce food waste? Start small. Add a food waste tracker to find out where you're wasting. Reduce your bulk purchases for items that rarely sell. In fact, you should review your menu and eliminate those items that rarely sell.
Variety is good. Waste is not.
Some restaurants even find alternative ingredients to replace ones where waste is high so that their menus can stay relatively the same.
Food Waste in Restaurants Statistics
Move For Hunger found that 85% of unused food goes in the trash and only a very small portion is donated. Adding to this stat is:
- 15% of all food that ends up in landfills is from restaurants
- 11.4 million tons of food is wasted annually in the US
- $1 of investment in food waste reduction equals $8 in savings
If you focus on reducing your restaurant's food waste, you have a positive impact on the environment while also saving more money in the long-term.
It's a win-win for your business.
But to be able to curb waste, you need to know why it happens in the first place.
Why Food Waste in Restaurants Happens
If you want to avoid food waste in restaurants, it requires a review of multiple sources:
Large portions
Uneaten food costs you money. If your patrons are discarding portions of their food, it means that you can cut back on portion sizes. Smaller portions reduce direct food waste and have immediate savings for owners.
Over-purchasing
Bulk purchasing is common. You have agreements with vendors, and the more you buy, the more you save. An issue with this concept is that if some ingredients don't sell fast enough, they end up in a landfill.
Predictive analytics and ordering can help you reduce overall waste with smarter, data-backed ordering.
Prep Waste
Inefficient food preparation also costs you money. For example, maybe your main chef cuts off too much meat while trimming fat. Or, perhaps when peeling veggies, there is excess waste because the prepper discards the vegetable when there is more that could be peeled.
Storage
Inadequate storage also has a direct correlation to ingredient and food waste. Incorrect temperatures or lids cause ingredients to spoil faster.
What's your main source of food waste? We don't know. You have to conduct your own internal reviews to see if you're over-purchasing, storage is an issue or maybe you're filling people's plates with portions that they can't finish.
5 Ways to Reduce Food Waste in Restaurants
An initial analysis of your restaurant's food handling and portion sizes is a good first start to reduce waste. If you want to take it a step further, these are five opportunities for you to begin reducing your overall waste:
1. Inventory Optimization
Restaurants always have some level of food waste, and a major portion of it is often due to poor inventory management. You over-buy certain items or dishes don't sell like you planned, so ingredients end up in the landfill.
You can make an immediate impact on your waste by:
- Integrating food waste tracking. Record inventory right inside your point-of-sale systems. Monitoring stock levels helps you avoid overstocking your shelves.
- Forecasts. Predictive analysis systems allow you to forecast demand for your food using historical data. Using these systems lets you know how much to order based on seasonal trends, customer demand, local events and other data that you collect over the years.
- FIFO. First in, first out is a concept many eateries are following. You make use of older ingredients to reduce waste and spoilage. Create a labeling system that allows you to keep track of ingredient freshness dates.
2. Review Your Portions
Customers like big portions, but are you offering too much? Signs that your portions are too big include everyone going home with leftovers and customers leaving too much on their plates. You can eliminate these oversized portions by:
- Measuring portion sizes to be equal among guests
- Creating visual guides to reduce the risk of overfilling plates
Even a 10% reduction in portion size reduces food waste drastically.
3. Add a Food Waste Tracker
Where is the waste coming from? Your track will tell you. Create a tracking system that accounts for food loss. For example, a daily log of waste that is based on:
- Food
- Day
Add the quantity of the food wasted to better understand how much food is being discarded and why it's being discarded.
Your tracker will help you analyze trends and even set your food waste reduction goals.
4. Work with Food Banks
Waste to some degree is inevitable. Why not give back to your community? If you have a surplus of food, it's better if you send it to food banks or shelters that can feed people. Just be sure that the food is still safe to consume.
5. Train Your Staff
Your staff members are the backbone of reducing food waste. Train your staff on ways to upcycle ingredients, hold specials to serve dishes with ingredients that are quickly on their way to spoiling and work with managers to refine inventory management.
Small steps like these allow you to save money on food waste and keep customers coming back.
Why Owners Are Trying to Find Ways to Reduce Food Waste in Restaurants
Cutting back on costs and running a LEAN restaurant are two objectives of restaurant owners. You can meet these goals while still helping create a sustainable business by reducing your food waste.
Your efforts will:
- Save you money
- Boost your eatery's sustainability
- Attract customers who want to minimize their impact on the environment
Food waste costs you money and fills landfills. Implement the strategies above to help you curb waste while keeping your customers happy.
Remember: one dollar spent on reducing waste saves the average restaurant $8, so it's a good investment in your future and sustainability.