How to Reduce Restaurant Food Waste. Restaurant Recycling Program — Poster POS
January 19, 2019 • 6 minutes
How much money are you throwing away every day? We’re asking because your restaurant food waste is directly proportional to the amount of money you lose daily. And this is the reason why you should start your own restaurant food waste recycling program.
In a recent study by Feeding America, $218 billion worth of food is being thrown away each year in the United States. And these food wastes are what made 20% of the landfill. These staggering numbers have developed the United Nation’s ambition to cut the amount wastes, at least, to half by the year 2030. Luckily many restaurant owners decided to support this initiative. As a result, reducing food wastes became one of the biggest restaurant industry trends. And this is through starting a restaurant food waste management system.
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Step 1: Restaurant Waste Management
Starting a restaurant waste recycling does not only create a pleasant environment for your customers. It also improves your revenue as a business.
Clean surrounding, tidy trash bins, and a fresh ambiance can attract more customers to your restaurant. And this has a direct effect on your bottom-line.
In fact, a study conducted by Unilever revealed that 47% of diners are concerned about food waste management.
Therefore, by having a restaurant management system, you do not only cut your expenses but also generate more revenue for having a friendly environment.
Step 2: Responsible Team for Managing the Garbage
To successfully begin your restaurant food waste recycling, you should train and delegate the program to a responsible team.
While you can hire a company to do the restaurant recycling program for your business, it’s more effective if you have your staffs aligned with your goals.
When choosing your team’s lead, it’s ideal to pick someone who is directly involved in the meal preparation. At the same time, someone who is systematic in monitoring, recycling, and storage of your wastes.
Assigning someone responsible and dedicated to lead the restaurants recycling program, you can definitely reduce wave, save money, and get more people in.
Step 3: Food Waste Audit
Start your restaurant waste recycling by conducting a food waste audit.
As the old adage says, you cannot improve what is not measured. So, the first step is to identify the amount of waste your restaurant produce each day. By doing so, you will know where most of your wastes come from. Thus, you can reduce it.
This can be done by tracking the foods being thrown out and the reason why. Then, analyze how much those wastes amounts in sum.
Also, pay attention to the food your customers buy but don’t eat so you can manage your menu and change it based on your customer’s buying behavior. Thus, lessening the wastes by minimizing the use of ingredients that aren’t being consumed by your customers.
Step 4: Ways to Reduce Food Waste
Through recycling restaurant food waste and working on your supply streams, you can definitely reduce your food wastes.
This includes using reusable utensils on your restaurant instead of disposables. You can also talk to your suppliers and ask them to only deliver items that have a compostable and recyclable packaging so you won’t have to deal with wastes.
It’s also advisable to serve drinks on a glass or refillable bottles instead of cans. Also, it’s advisable to promote food takeout to your customers to reduce leftovers.
Step 5: Sorting Restaurant Waste
Sort your wastes using different containers. The most common containers are Recyclables, Composites, and Landfills. But this can still be subcategorized into meats, fruits, large bottles, small bottles, and so on.
Through sorting your garbages, you would know which can be reused and not.
Not just that. Everyone in your business should be responsible for sorting the restaurant wastes. And they should be aware of the kind of wastes in each container.
By using graphics in each bin, it would be easier to show your people exactly what goes where.
Step 6: Compare Purchase and Quantity of Garbage
By doing restaurant inventory regularly, you get an insight into which goods and ingredients are consumed on a daily basis. Similarly, which needs replenishment as soon as possible.
This also helps you identify your stock’s expiration date and if it’s due to waste or disposal.
By having all these tracked and recorded, you can easily compare your purchase to the quantity of garbage your restaurant make. As a result, you got the chance to reduce cost by reducing your wastes.
Step 7: Minimize Quantity of Leftovers
One of the ways on how you can minimize leftovers is by implementing more effective restaurant POS system. For an instance, if you see that some of the meal ingredients go to waste because you can’t use it before the expiration or it is seldom get ordered, consider buying a smaller quantity of it. A POS system can help you oversee the in and outs of your restaurants. Therefore, you would know which one needs more stocks and not.
