The UK’s hospitality industry is in a period of recovery, fuelling hope that it will be just like old times. All remaining COVID-19 restrictions have been lifted, and consumer demand is out there. After years spent staring at their screens, people are ready to immerse themselves into the real world again. Many agree that the hospitality industry can look forward to a successful recovery from Easter onwards. Hospitality is the third-largest private sector in the UK, actively contributing to its recovery. Restaurant Food Waste-
As the demand for hotels and restaurants increases in a world that is slowly moving away from the coronavirus pandemic, we must pay attention to their impact on the planet. We live in times of unprecedented environmental and climate crisis, so businesses ought to ensure the resilience of the hospitality industry. From an economic, environmental, and social standpoint, it’s vital to keep food waste out of the landfill. Activities relating to handling and preparation of food lead to it being discarded. The causes of food waste are complex and can include unidentified demand, overstocking, staff behaviour, poor communication, and expires, just to name a few.
Wasted Food Isn’t Just a Social or Humanitarian Concern – It’s an Environmental One
Each year, countless tons of edible food is wasted. In the meantime, people go hungry. At present, the focus shouldn’t be on growing more food to feed more people. It’s necessary to make sure that what we already produce doesn’t go to waste. Given the nature of their work, hotels and restaurants generate significant amounts of food waste. Consumers want to see businesses doing more to manage their waste. They seek to engage with brands they can trust, so hotels and restaurants will need to improve their strategy.
Every time food is wasted, all the resources that go into the process of food production are wasted as well. Water, for example, is routinely used in food production. Farmers water crops. Packaging and transport take water. These energy-intensive processes use a lot of water. Saving food equals saving water. Overproduction in kitchens is accountable for food wastage. When food ends up in the landfill, it starts to decompose, therefore, emitting methane gas, which has more than 80 times the warming power of carbon dioxide. Put simply, food waste exacerbates the climate change crisis with its considerable greenhouse gas footprint.
Preventing Restaurant Food Waste in Hotels and Restaurants Requires Better Planning and Management
Undoubtedly, waste can be hotels & restaurants biggest problem. Wasteful practices deplete profit margins and threaten financial health and long-term viability. Food waste is expensive to have collected, so finding an alternative solution to disposal is worth taking into account. Recycling leftover or unwanted food can reduce the costs of commercial waste management, not to mention that it allows food to be stored in a safe and convenient way. At any rate, hospitality companies can take simple steps to minimise their expenditure by preventing food waste and separating what goes into the bins.
Below are some basic tips on how to manage food waste.
Conducting Food Waste Audits
The idea of a food waste audit is to get a better understanding of how much food is wasted, what is wasted, and the reason/reasons behind the wastage. It’s necessary to assess and monitor food waste from the point source to the disposal source. Knowing how much food is generated in the business helps management benchmark performance and set targets for improvement. It’s up to the management team to develop a policy with clear objectives, procedures, and goals.
Engaging And Training Staff
Owing to the fact that staff members manage waste every day, they are uniquely placed to identify solutions. They should be asked for suggestions. Employees should be empowered to provide feedback and acknowledge it. It would be a mistake to punish the staff for food waste. It’s important to engage people and win over their minds and hearts to solve this critical issue. Success in combatting food waste depends mainly on employees’ goodwill.
Sorting And Baling Food Waste
Organic waste should be separated from other trash and recyclables. Organic waste is any biodegradable material that comes from a plant or an animal. Leftover food scraps can be turned into compost, which can be used to fertilise the soil, improve soil quality, and limit soil erosion. Food packages, glass, paper, and plastic can be recycled. They should be collected separately. Baling cardboard and plastic wrapping can appreciably reduce waste management costs. All these materials are valuable, especially when baled.
The Prevention of Restaurant Food Waste Is a Top Priority
For a percentage of their products, British hospitality businesses are losing the purchase cost of food. Additionally, they are unable to recover the add-on operational costs with labour, water, energy, and waste disposal. It goes without saying that they can derive benefit from maximising every resource they have. Reducing food waste makes perfect sense in a world characterised by finite resources and increasing financial pressures.
The best way to deal with food waste is to prevent it from happening in the first place. The waste management hierarchy puts prevention first. What follows is recycling, recovery, and disposal. These are the top actions for preventing food waste in a restaurant or hotel:
- Menu design. Some recipes require great ingredient preparation, not to mention that they are prone to waste. Using excess inventory, leftovers, or trim can reduce waste and improve efficiency. It would be best to use small plates to create menus. Money is saved in two key areas: food and labour.
- Rationalising the number of ingredients. Carrying out a rationalisation on just ingredient cost can lead to poor decisions. Waste and spoilage play an important part too. One ingredient can be cooked in different ways across various dishes.
- Having a “chef’s special” every day. Using food that is considered waste or rejects is very popular right now. The chef should leverage the unharnessed potential of food waste by making meals with ingredients such as vegetable peels.
- Offering just-in-time delivery. It’s not a good idea to pre-order large quantities of food, especially perishables. Just-in-time delivery helps minimise storage costs and spoilage. Inventory stock is delivered on an as-needed basis.