10 Tips on How to Reduce Food Waste in Restaurants

Food waste significantly impacts profit margins in the hospitality industry. In fact, in just America alone food waste can cost $162 million a year. This equates to around 33 billion pounds of food annually.

On a daily basis, restaurant food waste may seem like a small problem, but these small losses can rapidly accumulate into substantial financial burden. By asking yourself ‘How can we reduce food waste’ and taking the time to implement new procedures, you’ll help pave the way for all restaurants to actively reduce their food waste.

How to reduce food waste in restaurants

Food waste can fall into two categories:

• Pre-consumer waste - This accounts for 4-10% of a restaurant's food waste and occurs before it even reaches a guest's table. This could be due to food being overcooked and therefore unservable. 
• Post-consumer waste - This is where food waste occurs after the food has reached the guest's table. Guests leave up to 17% of their food uneaten, contributing to food waste in a restaurant.

Here are a few ways to reduce food waste:

Tip 1: Undertake a food waste audit

Conducting a waste audit allows you to properly understand the stock you waste and how frequently you waste it. Having this on record can help you calculate how much food waste is costing your company. This can also help you create a waste reduction strategy that boosts profits and decreases waste.

Tip 2: Create a waste management log

Tracking waste through this process lets you monitor reduction effectiveness and identify operational improvements needed. This can also encourage staff to follow waste management strategies, ensuring you’re throwing away as little food as possible.

Tip 3: Plan your menu more effectively 

Planning your menus more effectively prevents dishes from being sent back to the kitchen, allowing you to make the most value out of your menu items.  

When planning your menu, we recommend identifying which menu items use the same ingredients. Having a number of dishes with the same ingredients allows you to buy in bulk. This helps you save money, boost profits, and reduce food waste caused by spoilage.

Tip 4: Enhance your inventory management 

Optimizing your inventory management is crucial to reducing food waste in your restaurant. Remember it’s not just about keeping an eye on your food, you need to track beverage waste as well. 

Acting on the first in first out method will help you prevent food spoilage and ensure food waste is kept to a minimum.

Tip 5: Store food properly 

Ensure fridges and freezers are running at the correct temperatures and that high risk and low risk foods are stored separately to prevent cross contamination and food spoilage. 

Implementing a clear labeling system will also ensure no mixups are made and that food is consumed before it goes off. This will also make it much easier to keep on top of your inventory management.

Tip 6: Provide food safety training

All staff members must be food safety trained to ensure they know how to safely handle, store and prepare food. You should stress the importance of the training and why food waste should be reduced to ensure staff follow procedures.

Tip 7: Allow customers to make swaps 

A great way to reduce restaurant food waste is by giving your customers the option to swap items on the menu. For example, if a customer orders a burger, you could give them the option of ordering chips or a side salad. This should help combat food waste as your customers are opting for the food item they’re more likely to eat. 

Tip 8: Donate food

As a business, you can donate your leftover food to local charities or hospices. You can also use digital platforms like Too Good To Go to make it easy to distribute food to those who need it while making some extra money.

Tip 9: Compost food waste

Where possible you could use food waste as compost. Use it to grow your own produce for the restaurant or even get in touch with local allotments to see if they would be interested in utilising your food waste. This is a great way to ensure food isn’t completely wasted.

Tip 10: Track the popularity of your dishes

Monitoring dish popularity helps you refine your menu to reduce waste and better serve customer preferences. Using Customer Experience Management Platforms like Yumpingo allows you to easily track guest sentiment and understand whether customers enjoy your food. 

Get in touch with us today or book a demo today to learn more about how we can help you better understand your customers.

The benefits of reducing food waste

33% of all food globally goes to waste, making it clear that reducing your food waste has a positive impact, not just on you, but on the planet as well. Some benefits of reducing food waste include:

Saving money

Planning your menus, enhancing your inventory management and undertaking food waste audits enable you to make changes that significantly reduce your restaurant’s food waste and help you cut costs.

By understanding your restaurant’s performance and recording customer experience at a more granular level you’ll be able to make better business decisions such as removing underperforming dishes from your menus. This can contribute toward increased profit margins, ultimately helping you run your restaurant efficiently and effectively.

Enhanced business reputation

Decreasing the amount of food you waste can have huge effects on your company’s reputation. Demonstrating your commitment to sustainability and reducing carbon emissions builds loyalty among staff and customers. It showcases your care for them and the planet while delivering excellent service and quality food.

If you get your meals right every time and reduce the amount of dishes being sent back, you’ll be on the money. Using a Customer Experience Management Platform can help you understand what your customers enjoy about your food and the quality of service. This information can help you improve your customer experience, in turn improving your profits.    

How to control food waste with Yumpingo 

Here at Yumpingo, we understand the importance of monitoring your food waste bins. Simple ways you can track this is through asking questions like:

• Are our portions too large? Is a lot of food being left on returning plates?
• Are our meals hot all the way through? If not there may be a technical issue in the kitchen causing food to be thrown away.
• Are plates not being served quick enough? Are they going to the table luke-warm or cold?
• Are people not enjoying meals but also not making any complaints?

Our Customer Management Experience technology can help you collect valuable data and insights that encourage you to reduce your restaurant’s food waste. Our software collects live guest feedback relating to the dishes you serve; boosting guest happiness, loyalty and sales.

To find out more about how our Customer Management Experience software can help you reduce your food waste, get in touch with us today.