Food Waste Intelligence

Trim waste is the second largest source of food waste in kitchens, just behind overproduction. Some trim waste is unavoidable. Regardless, it all represents a financial hit: while you may not eat an orange peel, your kitchen still paid for it. And protein trimmings are most costly than ever.

So it’s important to make sure your kitchen accumulates as little trim waste as possible.

To help with that, here are four questions to ask your kitchen manager, chef or frontline team to make sure reducing trim waste is top of mind.

Today, September 29^th, we celebrate the International Day of Awareness of Food Loss and Waste, an important day which was added to the UN calendar three years ago – and we were excited to join our colleagues at the Future Food Institute in bringing this to fruition.

Three years from its creation, the need to draw attention to the scale of the food waste challenge is more important than ever.  A new report from the World Wildlife Fund, for example, notes that 40% of global food production is lost or wasted annually, with food waste alone accounting for 10% of the world’s greenhouse gas emissions. 

Thus, at a high level, with over 800 million hungry and myriad environmental externalities associated with food waste, responsible foodservice organizations already have strong incentive to focus on preventing the occurrence of food waste.

Questions. Everyone has them. I have been fortunate enough to work with hundreds of organizations and thousands of chefs and most of them have the same thing in common: they have a food waste problem and they want a solution for it. I get asked A LOT of questions. Most of the questions I get asked are about repurposing - like, “Chef, do you have a recipe for orange peels?” or “What do I do with leftover pizza dough?” Most of these types of questions have to do with chefs looking for recipes or ideas to creatively turn trim waste or overproduced food into a profit-generating menu item.  I am always happy to help a fellow chef find a solution.

Outside of being a consultant and a walking recipe database, I do get asked many questions that seem to resurface on a regular basis.  Below are the 5 most common questions that come up; let’s see if these solutions can apply to your kitchen.

Over the past 12 months the environmental issues that have seen the most increase in concern among consumers are climate change, water shortages and food shortages, according to a new survey from market research firm Mintel.

All three of those–as well as 8 of the full 10 most pressing environmental concerns among consumers–can be directly addressed with a single initiative that has a nexus impact: preventing food waste.

These new findings, combined with other recent research showing increased awareness of food waste among consumers, reinforces the opportunity foodservice operations have to address their customer’s top-of-mind environmental concerns by addressing food waste.

Food waste prevention–the only way to address food waste that delivers triple-bottom-line benefits–requires new kitchen tools and workflows. For busy kitchens with thin margins, this rightly brings up questions – and can lead to misconceptions. 

One of the biggest myths about food waste prevention is that it takes too long. In fact, food waste tracking and the prevention it enables not only saves money, it saves time, making kitchen teams more efficient. 

Let’s dig a little deeper into this myth and get a better idea of the actual ROI on food waste tracking.