10 ways restaurants can reduce food waste

Why do we need to reduce food waste in restaurants? 

According to a report by Champions 12.3, a unique international coalition committed to tackling food waste, a third of all food produced in the world is lost or wasted. This has serious ramifications on the environment (waste that ends up in landfills produces a large amount of methane, contributing to global warming) but also on our finances. Wasting a third of the world’s food equals $940 billion in economic losses annually. 

A report carried out in 2023 by Waste Managed UK, an industry involved in waste collection, recycling, and landfill management highlighted that restaurants and cafes in the UK throw away 920k tonnes of food every year. This number accounts for approximately 10% of total food waste in the UK.  

Fortunately, many restaurants in the UK have made progress in managing their food waste. The latest food waste legislation requires companies to change how they handle and dispose of food waste. Environmentally sustainable places are also more popular, with 24% of customers willing to pay more. 

Therefore, managing food waste makes good business sense, as well as helping the environment. 

Sources of food waste in restaurants 

Food waste in restaurants comes from various sources and can vary widely depending on the type of dining. The waste coming from the kitchen of a fast-food restaurant will be different than the hotel’s breakfast buffet or a fine dining restaurant. 

Here are some of the most common causes of food waste in restaurants that make a good starting point for making improvements: 

Over-ordering

Many kitchens feel like it’s better to be over-prepared than under-prepared and manually planning orders can lead to a massive discrepancy between what is needed and what ends up wasted. Over-ordering, especially of perishable items will lead to waste. 

Spoilage

Over-ordering leads to food reaching its expiry date and ending up as waste. Additionally, poor stock management such as not rotating stock or adopting the FIFO method (first in first out) leads to stock expiring and being wasted. 

Customer leftovers

A study on restaurants in the UK indicated that as much as 30% of food waste comes from customer leftovers which may suggest that typical portion sizes are too big. 

Overproduction

Overproduction of preprepared items accounts for a huge 65% of waste in restaurants according to the same study. 

Human error

Orders that are taken incorrectly or food that’s sent back to the kitchen due to being overcooked or a mistake in preparation are common occurrences in fast-paced restaurant environments but contribute to waste. 

What can restaurants do to cut food waste? 

There are multiple waste disposal methods in the food industry but use of them should be a last resort. Better kitchen waste management and instilling better food production methods in the hospitality industry are where operators need to start in the battle against food waste. 

As well as implementing processes to reduce food waste in your kitchen to save money, it’s also important to think about the environmental impact of food waste from businesses and consider some of the ways that you could keep your food from ending up as waste and help your local community. Excess ingredients that will soon be going out of date or finished dishes that won’t be eaten in time could be donated to homeless charities or community fridges. It is worth contacting local charities and organisations to find out about the best way to give excess food to them. All these practices mean leftover food from restaurants found a new home while cutting food waste. 

It can be difficult to identify the causes of food waste in your restaurant, so we’ve compiled a list of 10 ways you can reduce the waste generated in your business and protect your profits.

1. Record waste 

Keeping accurate records of food waste will help you determine how much food waste is being generated and the cost so that you can ascertain how big an issue it is in your operation. In addition, recording food waste provides a benchmark so you can see exactly how much of an impact your new food waste reduction processes are having over time. Many restaurant businesses utilise food waste management software so they don’t need to worry about the manual task load of recording waste regularly and can review food waste in real-time rather than at the end of the week or month.

2. Look at ordering

Over-ordering is a huge driver of unnecessary food waste in restaurants and it’s an easy area to start making changes straight away. Don’t simply re-order the same order every week – closely monitor sales and food waste so you don’t continuously over-order the same products. Think about ordering perishable items in smaller quantities more frequently to help reduce fresh produce reaching its expiry date.

3. Don't overprepare

Closely tracking your sales over several weeks or months and then using this information to determine your busiest days of the week/month will help you estimate more accurately when it comes to pre-preparing food. And don’t forget to get in touch with local community groups or sign up for an app like Too Good to Go to donate pre-prepared items that end up unused.

4. Store food correctly

All your kitchen staff should know the proper practices for storing, rotating, and labelling food to ensure it is used efficiently and food is not left to expire. Remember to use the FIFO (first in first out) method to rotate stock and use the oldest items first.

5. Train staff

Food safety and storing training is essential for anyone working in a kitchen or handling food and regular annual refresher training can be useful to ensure standards don’t slip. But training can also help your front-of-house teams to ensure you avoid errors in orders, for example ensuring that your wait staff always repeat back orders to customers and double-check allergy requests or menu item changes such as if a customer asks for a dish that usually includes parsley to be made without it or foods with specific cooking preferences like steak to avoid dishes being sent back to the kitchen.

6. Inventory management

Keep an accurate inventory of all the stock you have so that you reduce the instances of overordering or missing expiration dates. Inventory management software is very helpful in managing stock levels in real-time without creating a lot of manual recording and allows every member of staff responsible for ordering to know exactly what’s needed and what isn’t. A digital inventory record also allows you to record data over time to see what items are being recorded as waste the most frequently and enables you to more accurately identify the items contributing to regular food waste.

7. Track sales

It’s also important to monitor sales to find out your most and least popular dishes. By eliminating unpopular dishes – especially where they include uncommon ingredients – you can reduce waste. Software that allows you to monitor sales in relation to the cost of ingredients can help you identify the most and least profitable items on your menu as well, so if you have an unpopular and expensive to make the dish – this is one you can cut from your menu.  

8. Adjust your menu

Customer leftovers account for a significant amount of waste generated in restaurants and identifying ways to reduce this waste can save you money. Consider reducing portion sizes or making some adjustments to your menu – such as offering different sizes of items, for example, smaller appetite portion sizes as well as a regular portion size or offering large and small portions of sides. If you are generating a lot of food waste, you may need to think about reducing the number of dishes on your menu or getting creative and making more dishes from multi-use ingredients.

9. Repurpose ingredients

If you have stock that’s getting close to its expiry, then this is another opportunity to get creative and repurpose these ingredients into a dish of the day or soup of the day. Updated legislation on calorie labelling states that food that is on a menu for less than 30 consecutive days in total across the year is excluded from the legislation, which makes it easier to be reactive when preventing food waste. 

10. Order in season

Fresh food that is out of season has to be transported further and this often means that it has a shorter shelf life in your kitchen. So, ensuring you always order in season will help you to keep fresh food longer and lead to less food waste. 

How tech in restaurants can help reduce food waste 

Many kitchens aren’t keeping on top of food waste management because the traditional manual methods of monitoring food waste are a time-consuming job that is very difficult to see and understand what is being wasted and what to do about it. 

Using the right software in your restaurant can help you record waste as well as understand what has been wasted and why, so you can get a better handle on the situation. 

The seamless transfer of data in our purchase to pay software solution between the food waste module directly into the core food waste management system, including food flash, stock control, and our menu costing solution, provides a full 360° kitchen management solution for restaurants. Technology makes it easy to put a waste reduction plan in place and then monitor the effect on your bottom line. 

If you’re ready to put  food waste management software  into action and start saving money in your restaurant business discover more about how our stock control, ordering, menu costing, and waste management  purchase to pay system can help you.  Or take a look at our suite of  software for restaurants.