Real Ways Restaurants are Preventing Food Waste in Their Kitchens

Plan to prevent.

Careful planning is essential to avoid the creation of waste. Here are some areas in which you can improve your kitchen team’s organisation:

• Order carefully, always aiming to match stock with demand, and only buy ingredients at a usable volume. Buying in bulk to save money might be tempting, but is only worth it when you know you will use the food in question. Tread carefully when it comes to non-perishable items. When Wahaca develops a new recipe/special, they forecast sales across different sites. “Based on forecast volumes, we will ensure we are only ordering new products in pack sizes and with a shelf life that won’t incur wastage,” says Carolyn Lum, Sustainability Manager. “Our recipes are also set up so that they can be batched up or down easily depending on sales at a site to reduce any potential wastage.”
• Data collection and tracking trends in covers over time can be an enormous help in predicting demand. The team at The Assemblies analyses both weekly and year-on-year data, pinpointing trends so that they can predict busier and quieter periods. This allows them to monitor and adjust their orders, reducing the risk of surplus food arriving in the first place.
• Plan for using every part of every ingredient. Jeremy Lee, Chef Patron at Quo Vadis, shares how they champion offal and ‘lesser’ cuts. “Too often, restaurants focus on the prime cuts of meat, ignoring and thus wasting fine ingredients that we cherish, such as tongue, liver or onglet. At Quo Vadis, we make a concerted effort not just to include these, but to celebrate them by placing them at the centre of dishes.” Meanwhile, at Pythouse Kitchen Garden, the team focuses on whole vegetable cooking to minimise waste, using offcuts and peelings to create everything from powders and salts to a special house XO sauce and a vegemite-like umami paste.
• Design menus that allow for a circular approach, using certain ingredients in different ways across a number of dishes. A great example is Gaucho’s quarterly Sustainable Supper Club, which is based on zero-waste principles: the bespoke menu is designed around whatever food is left from prepping à la carte dishes.
• Where items can’t be used immediately, can they be preserved for another time? At Walled Gardens Underground Restaurant, Chef Proprietor Eddie Shepherd makes clever use of distillation, pickling and fermentation for preserving surplus or seasonal ingredients, building a larder of prepared ingredients that he can draw on throughout the year.
• If possible, review your menu regularly and remove dishes that aren’t proving popular. At The PIG, they change the menu often – sometimes up to twice a day! – to reflect what they have available, rotating dishes and adjusting garnishes as needed.
• Be smart and strategic about how much food your kitchen needs to prepare in advance. Batch cooking saves time but, if not properly considered, it can waste both food and money. 
• Standardise portion sizes and review where necessary. If your menu has items that are consistently left unfinished, those portions should be reduced to prevent food ending up in the bin. “The simplest and most effective approach is through serving sensible sized portions,” says Phillipa Hughes, Director at The Bull Inn. “This drastically mitigates the most offensive source of food waste – chucking prepared and cooked food into the bin simply because too much was put on the plate."

Stock management matters.

Diligent management of your stock will make sure nothing goes out of date before it gets used.

• Order carefully, using data to predict busier and quieter periods. This will allow you to adjust orders, reducing the risk of surplus food arriving in the first place.
• Check that fridges and freezers are running at the right temperatures, ensure that low risk foods are always stored on higher shelves than high risk foods and keep storage areas clean and tidy. 
• Be diligent about stock rotation so that everything is used in time. Check use-by dates on a daily basis. Are any ingredients regularly going out of date, and how can operations be tweaked to avoid these losses? 
• Make sure containers are always clearly labelled with product descriptions and date information. 
• Keep a running stock inventory so you always know what you have to hand and what needs to be ordered. 

Get the team on board.

Real change is only possible with the help of your team, so be sure to emphasise the importance of reducing food waste across your company.

• Empower your staff to reduce waste wherever possible and offer incentives for doing so. At Hawksmoor, they use data to create a little healthy competition among their locations. “We even calculate the amount of cling film we use per customer per restaurant,” says Co-Founder Huw Gott. “Suddenly each restaurant wants to be the top of the leader board for minimising cling film usage!” 
• Consider designating a food waste manager or team to encourage ownership.
• Provide regular training to ensure that employees understand how waste should be segregated and why this matters. At Fooditude, they keep an eye out for fresh ideas from outside organisations that can help them reduce food waste, like the WRAP Guardians of Grub food waste training course.
• Upskilling can be a big help, and great knife skills can avoid a lot of waste. You might even consider bringing butchery in-house, allowing you to save money by buying whole or half carcases, breaking them down in the kitchen and using every bit, including the offal. Even bones can be used for marrow or to make stock. At Lyle’s, whole animals are supplied direct and broken down into various cuts with each element being used: the heads for terrines, bellies for slow cooking or curing, legs for charcuterie and hams. As Chef Proprietor James Lowe points out, this system is also in the best interests of the farmers in their network.
• Be sure to ask for feedback on how waste can be prevented — some of the most innovative ideas can come from the kitchen and front-of-house staff who are actively involved in everyday operations. 

Be flexible.

Maintaining a degree of flexibility and adapting where necessary is important to ensure food doesn’t go to waste.

• Implement a daily special specifically to use up perishable items.
• Allow your strategy to evolve over time. If you find there’s one particular ingredient that is wasted often, adjust your order size, find an alternative with a longer shelf life or look for an additional way to incorporate it into your menu.
• If you do find yourself with leftover offcuts or scraps, always look to use them somewhere else. At Ozone Coffee Roasters, surplus oat and dairy milks from the coffee bar are churned into rich ricotta for omelettes or used to create a condensed oat syrup for granola and baked goods, while sourdough off-cuts are milled into flour for their signature crumpets or reused as a starter.
• Where an item doesn’t fit into your menu, why not figure out how you could turn it into an amuse bouche? An unexpected and complimentary bite adds an element of delight, boosting customer satisfaction.

Measure, monitor, minimise.

You can’t reduce what you don’t measure.

• Carefully segregate and measure your in-house waste. Every time you make a particular recipe, what and how much is wasted? How can your recipe or processes be changed to avoid this? 
• If one ingredient or part of an ingredient is wasted often, make a change. Adjust your order size, find an alternative with a longer shelf life, look for an additional way to incorporate it into your menu or decide to do without it altogether.
• Learn from your mistakes! When something does slip through, consider how you can plan better next time. In the meantime, follow the food waste hierarchy to make sure the food is reused, repurposed or redistributed while it’s still edible.

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