The best way to reduce kitchen waste is to prevent it from happening in the first instance, maximising financial and carbon savings by preventing raw materials from being used unnecessarily.
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Protect Your Food Business
Question:
How to reduce kitchen waste?
Answer:
The best way to deal with food waste is to prevent it from happening in the first instance, maximising financial and carbon savings by preventing raw materials from being used unnecessarily.
Read on for advice on how to achieve a real reduction in the amount of food waste produced in your kitchen.
Perform a waste audit
Monitoring and measuring is the first step. The ‘three bin’ approach is an easy way to accomplish this. Install labelled bins to collect food waste from three areas: kitchen prep, spoiled food and customer plates.
Monitor how much waste is collected in each bin over a specified period of time — say, one week of service. Once you’ve identified where your biggest problems lie, you can introduce targeted measures to tackle them.
Get staff involved
Emphasise the importance of reducing food waste and ensure that employees understand how it should be segregated; you might also appoint a designated food waste manager or team to encourage ownership.
Empower staff to reduce waste wherever possible and offer incentives for doing so. Be sure to ask for feedback — some of the most innovative ideas can come from the kitchen and front-of-house staff.
Practise stock rotation
Use the ‘first in, first out’ method when storing food, placing newer stock to the back to ensure that older items are used first. Check use-by dates often.
Careful menu design is one of the most effective ways to reduce waste.
Rationalise the size of your order by ensuring certain ingredients can be used across a number of dishes. Introduce a daily special, specifically designed to use up ingredients that might otherwise go to waste. Review your menu regularly and remove dishes that aren’t proving popular.
Predict food orders
Having a system in place to help you predict orders — whether manually or with the help of digital technology — means more accurate data, a better understanding of order patterns and more control, which ultimately leads to less waste and more money saved.
Exercise portion control
Be wary of oversized food portions — quality is more important than quantity. If your menu has items that are consistently left unfinished, it’s time to reduce those portions to prevent waste.
Donate. Ensure that anything you can’t use goes to a good home.
Partner up with OzHarvest or a similar enterprise, or link with a local food bank to donate leftover meals and/or ingredients. (Source: Hospitality Magazine 30 June 2022: Sponsored Content by Nutritics’ software).
Method
All businesses make purchases of one kind or another whether it is raw materials or simply office supplies.
Understand purchasing and stock control – manage this asset and free valuable capital.
Understand the controls to save time, money and reduce wastage!
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