Real talk: How Do We Rethink Waste When it Starts Long Before the Kitchen?

Juliane: Hello, everyone. It's Juliane Caillouette Noble here, Managing Director of The Sustainable Restaurant Association. I'm really excited to have an amazing conversation today about food waste in restaurants. 

This is part of our series of Real Talk conversations with chefs, restaurateurs and businesses all around the world, talking about the issues that are affecting their restaurants and how they are tackling them. James, thank you so much for being here with me. If you don't mind, could you introduce yourself? 

James: I'm James. I am from restaurant Wild Shropshire, up in Whitchurch, right in the middle of the country. We are a 14-cover, tasting menu-only restaurant. And alongside our restaurant, we have our own little farm and our own little laboratory. It's not a laboratory, it’s a little room with toys, but we call it the laboratory... it's all connected and works with what we do. 

Juliane: Brilliant. It's a brilliant restaurant that you've got there, as you say, right up towards the border between Wales and England. I'm excited to hear about some of the specifics of the operation and what you guys are doing in your kitchen to hopefully inspire others in this conversation. So, first and foremost, could you talk to us a little bit about why reducing waste is important to you and to the restaurant? 

James: You can look at this from lots of different ways. From a very cynical chef point of view, I can look from a financial point of view and say every little bit of waste is money lost. We're a super ambitious restaurant, and to be super ambitious, you've got to have staff in place, etc. All those things need paying for. Waste is one of the ways of helping pay for those things.  

It sounds completely cynical. From a broader sense of point of view — without sounding too dramatic — the world is on fire. And, you know, we could talk philosophically about it, but restaurants are entertainment. Unless you're one of the Centrals or Noma or an El Bulli or something really forward-thinking, we’re entertainment. We’re somewhere people go to have a nice time. So, we really need to look at what we're doing and our impact and minimise that. Waste is one of the aspects of that. 

We’re a restaurant deeply entrenched within nature and our environment. It's our job to look after that. We can't just take, take, take without trying to give something back. That sounds really clichéd. To make the business sustainable long-term — not just financially, but in a broader sense — we've got to negate a lot of what we do. If it doesn't become sustainable, eventually it will die. I know that sounds overly dramatic, but that's where we are now. 

Juliane: So, let’s talk a little bit about the nitty-gritty of your restaurant. How do you guys work to cut waste in your kitchen operations? What does that look like both back-of-house and front-of-house in terms of how you address these issues? 

James: When we first started this road, I always wanted a restaurant with a farm because, from years back, I wanted great ingredients. And then we got talking along the sustainable road, and it was something we really felt was right for us to do. 

So, we sat down as a team and said, how is our business impacting? What do we need to do to cut waste? We're a tasting menu. I can tell you exactly how many guests we've got this week. So, I can pick exactly the right amount of garlic, or we can take the exact amount of meat, scallops or whatever proteins we use. So, we don’t have a huge amount of food waste. 

Then we had to look at other sides of the business. Now there is some waste: bones, shells, trim, things like that. We make stocks, stuff like that. But having that space on the farm, all food waste and organic waste goes into our composting system. So, in terms of organic waste, there's nothing at all. We can only do that because we've been privileged enough to be given a piece of land that we can build composting on. And I've got a guy who does that for me. 

In terms of front-of-house and back-of-house, we're a very small restaurant. We all work together. All of our packaging is recyclable. It can all go into our composting systems. We've spoken to our suppliers and said, right, we need to be able to compost everything. 

There is some plastic, which isn’t ideal. We've cut out probably about 90% of plastic. That all goes into recycling. Now, recycling is not ideal because it’s another process that takes energy, but it’s better than where we were. 

The goalposts are continually moving on this. We refine, refine, refine. Where we saw waste, for the most part, is the excess on the farm. Succession planting is really, really hard. One day we’ll have nothing, the next day we’ll have 3,000 radishes, which is not ideal. And I think that’s the same with most farms and growing. 

So, we've got what we call the lab now. We took a shipping container, converted it and put all sorts of toys in there. And instead of those things going to the compost system — which would give back, but is not ideal — we can ferment, pickle, distil and do lots of things with our excess vegetables, etc. 

That accounts for a lot of our waste. That stuff would usually go to the compost system, but instead it goes into fermenting stuff, which we’re using now because we don’t have a lot in the ground at the moment. Wild garlic is just starting to come up where we are, which will be great. In the next couple of weeks, everything on the menu is going to taste of wild garlic. 

The other place we really saw waste was in emissions. That goes back to us being entertainment. I read about whether restaurants can be sustainable, and my first answer was no. because we’ve got fridges, we’ve got ovens. My fridge is always on. My oven is on a lot. We're in the middle of nowhere so guests are driving really long ways to come and see us. That’s where we saw waste, so we embarked on a big project to try and offset all emissions. We look at the emissions that my staff create coming to and from work. Our booking manager has a conversation with our guests in terms of how they’re getting to us, how far they’re coming to visit us, etc. And then those of our suppliers as well. 

The idea is we use some very approximate calculations — at the moment, they have to be approximations for the system to work, but again, that’s part of our refinement process — and then we use a tree-planting company to plant trees to offset that. Again, that’s not ideal, but it’s some way down that road. And those are the places we found waste.  

We do other little things to tackle waste, like using whole animals and stuff like that, but lots of restaurants use whole animals.  

Juliane: You're right, lots of restaurants might be using whole animal butchery — and this isn’t a brand-new trend — but it still isn't the norm in terms of how the industry operates by any means. These things take refinement as well, because you need butchery skills. Are you buying in whole carcasses? Are you butchering them yourselves? Are you partnering with butchers? There are lots of different models in terms of how restaurants can choose to do those things. 

James: Coming from my background — having a midlife crisis and becoming a chef — before sustainability took such a massive role within what we’re doing, you very quickly get into a rhythm with meat. You get the same duck breasts, the same lamb cannons, things like that, and you always use the same bit. 

And then once we started using whole animals, suddenly it was like, oh my god, I’ve got to use this part of an animal I’ve never used before. It’s a real education. I've got to think about things. And, you know, my skill level’s gone up just because we've gone down this road and had to look at things in different ways. 

Juliane: And as much as the ‘nose-to-tail' conversation has existed in certain corners of the industry, this idea of carcass balance as a way of reducing waste is something that is incredibly important that we continue to talk about. Whether you’re doing it individually within your restaurant — buying a whole carcass and making sure you’re utilising every part — or whether we’re pushing the system to balance carcasses better by rethinking how we order, rethinking the choices of cuts that go on our menus, I think that’s a huge step toward managing waste. 

James: My butcher is brilliant, and she is very interested in carcass balance — she talks about it all the time. She'll talk to me about other restaurants, bigger restaurants, and they want, you know, 100 kilos of ribeye steaks. That’s a lot of cows. 

We’re very lucky that we’ve been able to align ourselves with a few people who’ve got the same ethos and values as us. I think when you get into this conversation about sustainability, you really have to do your homework in terms of who you’re working with, and make sure they work on the same values as you. It’s all well and good us trying to do something, but you need... it’s a whole “a community raises a child” type of thing, isn’t it? The community looks after our restaurant. We don’t have the fridge space for whole animal butchery. Rach, my butcher, has got to be on board as well. She is, and she's brilliant. She’ll push that with us. 

Juliane: I think this is a perfect segue to talk a little bit more about your supply chain and the work that you're doing with your suppliers. More broadly, this idea that partnership is incredibly important in our industry: we don’t operate in a vacuum. We have suppliers, we have farmers, up and down the value chain. Identifying who is a good partner for your business and whose values as a partner align with yours is a really important thing. 

Secondly, I think there’s an idea that in order to be sort of nose-to-tail in your approach, you need to do whole carcass butchery within your own kitchen. I’ve had a number of butchers come to me and say, what we want is to encourage restaurants to have better dialogue with their butcher — we butchers have skills, and we're passionate about these issues. It’s about having those dialogues, rather than saying you now need to be able to hang a whole half a cow in your fridge; that isn’t the best utilisation of resources. 

This whole 'sustainability is a system' thing is a really important realisation. For you guys as a small restaurant, you rely on the wider ecosystem and the partnerships around you. 

James: I think one of the issues with restaurants becoming sustainable is — well, we’re all super busy. As the restaurant owner, we have to farm off things to other members of staff, but you're super busy. There’s no infrastructure. It’s all very do-it-yourself and work-it-out-as-you-go-along. 

We've been very lucky to have some very clever people around us who’ve made this much easier and helped make it — not an easy transition, but an easier one. 

Juliane: Yeah, I think that's a really good point. And you're right — this industry is low margin and it's incredibly busy. There’s always something urgent: something’s broken, someone hasn’t shown up, something hasn’t turned up. 

It also relies on us not thinking of sustainability as a line item at the bottom of a to-do list. It really has to be a lens — a mindset shift on how you approach everything within your operations.  

James: I think a lot of people who want to do sustainability almost see it as an add-on, like, yeah, buy-in, and you can put it onto your website. And you kind of need to sit down and say, right, what do we do? How do we make this work? 

And you need to rebuild your business all the way up, with every tiny little aspect of everything. We don’t sous vide cook anymore because we can’t recycle the plastic and compostable ones are dreadful.  

We have to completely change how we work. I think it's for the better, for the restaurant, and it feels better in terms of what we’re producing now, but it’s not an easy process. It’s a mindset shift. Not just, “I've put on our sustainability hat now." This is what we are.

Juliane: Yeah, it’s a mindset shift. And like you say, it’s really taking a step back and saying, what are our values as a restaurant? What’s important to us? And how are we going to address those across these issues? 

James: The lab is brilliant. It is the most exciting thing. And I call it a lab, but you know, it’s a... 

Juliane: You’re allowed to call it a lab. We work in the industry. This is not the most pretentious naming of a foodservice business. 

James: It started as a joke, but it’s one of those jokes that’s just sort of hung around. 

Juliane: You’re not the only one who runs a lab in that way. 

James: I became a chef 12 or 13 years ago and the whole new Nordic scene was taking off and that was very much based on fermentation and pickling, etc. And I got into that based on these guys because it was the cool new thing to do, if I’m completely honest about it. But I fell in love with it. 

And it ties perfectly into everything else we’re doing. We have a few core processes. So, I don’t know, maybe I’ll go pick some wild garlic later. If it’s ready, we will turn it into oil, we’ll turn it into a pickle, we’ll turn it into a salt, turn it into a ferment. 

And then we’ve got all these things ready to go — all our jars, ready to go — and it takes 10 minutes to ferment this product, pickle this product, leave it there. 

At this time of the year, we’re serving a five-year-old mutton as our main course, our final savoury course, which is great because no one serves five-year-old sheep and it’s just a piece of meat. With this piece of meat — or pieces, we use a couple of different cuts every night — you get a little plate of pickles. We’ve got pickled larch rose on there, we’ve got umeboshi plums from plums stolen from my neighbour’s tree, we’ve got radish seed pods. We’ve had the radishes, we’ve used the flowers, the seed pods have come up and we’ve pickled them. We can start talking about these processes [with customers], and we can start talking about the lab, and about sustainability and how these things are creating flavours when we haven’t got any. 

From a sustainability point of view, it’s brilliant because we don’t waste anything. It all goes in there, whether it’s salted or dehydrated or whatever. There are all these millions of processes you can do. But for the most part, it’s there for flavour: it gives us some value at the end of it because we have flavour at this time of the year. Talking about the ‘Hungry Gap’, it’s just got sunny here for the last couple of days, so people are going to come into the restaurant expecting warmer food, summery food, going down that line, and we’re still not there. It was still frozen this morning. But these are ways that we can create flavours, which is, from a chef’s point of view, what’s really important — but from a more overarching point of view, it means that there’s nothing wasted over there. 

Juliane: I I love hearing these really tangible examples of these pickles that you guys are creating. It’s an important reminder of the opportunity that all the parts of a vegetable — or all the parts of an ingredient — provide in that flavour sense and having that creativity. Where we get really excited is when we see that it’s not just businesses like yours: innovator businesses that are at the forefront with tasting menus and a garden. It really excites me to think that you’re inspiring bigger restaurants or casual dining restaurants to start thinking differently. Like — did you know that you could use a seed pod from a radish and create flavour in that way? 

James: That’s what restaurants like Noma or Central are doing. It’s filtering down to us, and it’ll filter from us down to more mainstream restaurants. And then it’ll filter down to the high street. 

Juliane: High street, yeah. And the supermarket. You were saying that maybe it makes them think differently about other restaurants or ask questions of other restaurants. If you were to give advice to other restaurants looking to minimise food waste in their operation, and maybe a restaurant that isn’t a 12-seat tasting menu, what advice would you have to share? 

James: I think you need to sit down as a whole team — whether that be the owner who’s paying the bills, the kitchen porter who’s washing dishes, and everyone in between — and you need to discuss every single little process in your kitchen. You then need to decide: What can we change now? What can we change in the future? What is immediate, and what is more long-term? 

You know, we’ve got our long-term goals. Our building is incredible — eventually we’re going to build a beautiful building that is completely sustainable: solar-powered, water capture, all that. But at the moment, that’s not viable because we can’t find it. 

You need to sit down as a team. You need to look at all your processes. You need to assign somebody that's the head of it. They are the focal point for everything. 

I’ve got Amelia, who’s done all the work on this. She’s been our focal point. So, while I’ve got other things to think about — like paying VAT bills and paying staff insurance and making sure the restaurant’s full — there’s somebody else whose focus is this. 

And I think you need to look at every aspect of your business. You’ve got to. It can’t just be something that you tack on. You know, we talk about greenwashing, all that kind of stuff. It can’t just be, “We’ve gone paperless.” That’s great, but there’s all this other stuff you’ve got to do. And maybe not a timeline, but a plan: how are we getting from A to B to C to D? And yeah, have it goal-orientated, I guess. 

Juliane: I love that. Just to kind of pick up on some of those themes of what you’re saying, I love the idea of a constant dialogue with your team, from KP up through front-of-house, to think about understanding each of these steps in your operations that might be producing waste or might be inefficient.

Naming them, recognising that you can’t tackle everything always at once. You are going to have to set realistic priorities of what’s viable for your business and then delegate responsibility. I think that’s a hugely important thing to name in restaurants. Sometimes owners or chefs want to hold things quite close to their chest, and it’s important that we delegate those responsibilities so that everybody feels empowered to be a part of these conversations. 

James: First and foremost, I’m a chef. I cook in the restaurant. And if I’m not there, the restaurant’s not open. You know, we can look at all these bigger picture things, but I have to make really tasty food or no one’s coming. We could be the most sustainable restaurant in the world, but if it’s not tasty, no one’s going to come. For me, having somebody who picks up all the slack on that stuff and can be working on all these things in the background makes everything so much easier. It means it carries on going; there’s always that momentum. 

I’m Mr. 'I-get-very-excited-about-things-and-then-I-stop'. I move on to the next thing that excites me. I need to get really excited about something. But then this person can go, “Okay, brilliant. I’m going to do the nuts and bolts. I’m going to dot all the i’s and cross all the t’s,” etc. I’m a dreamer, you know — I’m that guy. I’ve got this idea. I need engineers, essentially. Do you know what I mean? 

Juliane: And consistency. We need both: the inspiration and the excitement, and then we need the consistency and the thoroughness of processes. Different people have different roles to play in that. That’s an important part of restaurants, right? You need the dreamers, the ideas people, and then you need the processes and the consistency to follow it up and to make sure it’s embedded. 

Thank you so much, James. This has been really a great conversation. I really enjoyed chatting to you and thank you for the work that you guys are doing at the restaurant. I really appreciate it. 

James: Thank you for having me.