What Can Business Do?
The first priority for businesses wanting to tackle food waste is to look at your planning, purchasing, preparation and storage and see where you can implement any improvements.
To help you identify these solutions, Do Something’s FoodWise site hosts the ‘Wise Up on Waste’ toolkit for food service operators. This kit from Unilever Food Solutions helps businesses to prevent food waste happening in the first place.
Do Something! also have our ‘Food Donation Toolkit’ on this site. Produced in partnership with the NSW EPA, this kit shows you how to donate high quality leftover food to charities.
There will always be food waste generated in the preparation process and by what comes back uneaten by guests. However, as the following tips from Unilever Food Solutions show, there are creative ways of reducing waste and turning leftovers into profit.
Tips for reducing business food waste
- Portion Sizes – Regularly check plates when they come back to understand which dishes are too heavy or too large. You may notice a lots of garnish left over or too much sauce.
- Making adjustments can help save money.
- Accurate Measuring – Use scales to measure out ingredients as well as portions. Your recipe should always be the basis for your selling price.
- It’s not unusual for an over-service of more than 40% to occur.
- Specials Board – A daily specials board can help to manage the extra throughput of ingredients. Perfect for great value seasonal items.
- Accurate Ordering – Employ accurate ordering and stock rotation to avoid ingredients going out of date.
- If there is a booking cancellation use ingredients on specials board.
- Get Creative – Be creative with vegetable trimmings to make tasty soups. Use toast from breakfast for breadcrumbs for fishcakes, and stale brioche for bread based puddings.
- Use of off cuts to create tasty starters eg, pork and chicken trimmings can be turned into pâtés and terrines. Turn excess produce into chutneys, pickles and jams.
- Dehydrate excess fruit and vegetables to create highly flavoured powders. Dry out the fruit or vegetable in a low oven and whizz through a processor. Use the vegetable powder in sauces or and fruit powders over sorbets and ice-creams.