Food Waste Focus

Salad Bar: A thorny issue
When starting a tracking/prevention program, it’s often the salad bar items them can be targeted early for an easy win. Why? Many cafe operations deem the salad bar easy to do, you set it up, keep it full and then throw it away.  It’s often not till we start tracking these items [...]

When tracking food waste, it’s invaluable to compare recent weeks against each other. Using a tool we call a Comparison Report you can highlight week to week changes and identify specific areas that are getting better as well as those that have gotten worse.
With ValuWaste Advantage 4, operators now have the ability to create Comparison [...]

Breakfast: Cutting the Pork
When starting a tracking/prevention program, it’s easy to overlook wasted breakfast meats. Why? Many cafe operations are focused on high volume lunch service, so the few stations that are open in the morning get setup early, loaded with par levels, so staff can focus on the upcoming lunch service.  However, if operators review [...]

Practice Greenhealth recently released a 10-Step Guide to Foodservice Composting.  Although it was written specifically with healthcare foodservice in mind, all the content should be generally applicable to most volume foodservice operations.
Download Practice Greenhealth Guide here: Composting 10StepGuide
Practice Greenhealth offers many other excellent resources on waste management. Visit their site at www.practicegreenhealth.org.

Which foodservice waste items qualify as “compostable?”
The answer depends on who will handle the composting – keep in mind that many commercial composters handle yard waste but cannot or will not accept food. Those that do handle food waste will usually accept all food waste (pre-consumer and post-consumer) as well as plant-based compostable disposables [...]

Soon after you start tracking food waste you run into a question about units of measure.  Do I want to track weight, servings, each/count, or volume.�
The answer is to track waste in the form that makes the most sense for that item and then convert it to a common metric for comparison purposes.�
For [...]

We just received these great Hints and Tips from some of our newest accounts.  We would like to share them with you:
“Schmoosh Pie” -  take day old pies that look tired and use a potato masher to break them up (“smoosh”).  Place contents in a cup and top with whipped cream.  Sell in the grab [...]

Day of the Week Waste Reports – Match Waste and Menus
Many operators have menus that stay mostly the same day-to-day while others run cycle menus and specials that create regular change.  Regardless of which type of menu you have, it’s very useful to review waste by day of the week.  This [...]

Timing is Everything: Watch the Calendar
We’ve found that chefs who are successful at maximizing sales and reducing waste are, in most cases, very good at predicting customer demand. The more accurately we can forecast demand, the less likely we are to have leftover items that become waste. The only thing you can count about customer [...]

In February 2010, we wrote a post about Food Holidays as possible reuse opportunities.  We had great response and wanted to continue posting about these for this month and next.
We mention these holidays, because they are fun (of course!), but also because incorporating these dates into your menu can help to reduce food waste by [...]