Food Waste Intelligence

It’s like any other priority in the kitchen: if chefs and managers don’t reinforce the message that food waste prevention matters, staff can easily lose focus. Your daily or weekly pre-shift meetings are one of the best opportunities to reinforce your priorities. Here are a few ways to keep your team focused on food waste.

We’ve all been to a catered event, whether it was a buffet or a plated meal, a business luncheon or a wedding reception, a breakfast line brimming with scrambled eggs and bacon or a break table piled high with pastries. But I’ll bet you’ve never been to a catered event that ran out of food.

Overproduction is a given for most caterers, because if they run out of food, there’s not a kitchen in the back to prep anything more. This type of food waste is the inconvenient truth of running and organizing a catering event. All the chefs, planners and attendees know it’s happening. Nobody likes it. We all struggle with how to fix the problem. Here are my top tips for preventing catering food waste using proven planning and strategy.

 I often get asked, “Chef, how can I motivate my staff to track their food waste?” It’s a good question, and one that comes up often. My simple answer usually is “You can’t.” I am a firm believer that you can’t motivate, but you can inspire. Motivation vs. Inspiration is a well documented topic and one that often leads me back to heated debates I used to get into when I served as the Dean of Culinary.

Culinary leaders and chefs often fail to understand a simple fact of human nature: people are intrinsically motivated beings. My students enrolling into culinary school were ALREADY motivated. When I was a working chef, I realized my kitchen staff would come to work for two reasons: to earn money to support themselves and their family and to make a difference in the lives of who they cook for. Motivating others is an outside-in approach to leadership that is not sustainable over time because people don’t need motivation. They need inspiration. Inspiring people is an inside-out approach to leadership that is entirely self-sustaining, as people strive to reach their fullest potential, whether in be in their personal lives, or their workplace.

My move to Leanpath was one of inspiration as I saw the work that Leanpath was doing to reduce food waste. One of our core values is - We are passionate about solving food waste - and it reads:

“Food is a precious resource. We are here to make a lasting impact in our world. Reduction helps ensure food is available to hungry people, natural resources aren’t wasted, and we’re combating the critical issue of climate change.”

For me, this is inspirational. It’s visionary. It’s the “Why” we are doing what we do. It aligns with an end goal. Motivation, although useful, is also short sighted it looks for the feel-good moment to keep going.

 So back to the original question, “how can I motivate my staff to track their food waste?” The answer is, you can’t, but you can INSPIRE them, and here are 5 ways to do that: 

Great knife skills--most chefs have them. Knives are the tools of our trade and when put in the hands of skilled craftsman, it is a beautiful thing to watch. I remember watching Iron Chef years back and witnessing Iron Chef Sakai peel an apple with a chef's knife that still amazes me to this day. The years and years it took to acquire that skill is impressive. Knife skills are the fundamental building block of any chef's career. It's the first thing that is taught to students in culinary school and it takes years to become proficient with a knife.

Why are knife skills so vitally important?

• Because people eat with their eyes first and food cut precisely has strong visual appeal.
• Because food needs to be cut uniformly to cook evenly.
• Because proper portioning drives cost and consistency.
• Because safety is top priority--a cook that doesn't know how to handle a knife is a danger to the kitchen and his/her own fingers!
• Because improperly fabricating meat, poultry, fish, or seafood can cost the restaurant  a lot of money!
• Because food that is not prepped properly leads to preventable waste--it is like purchasing product and throwing perfectly good food in the compost bin. 

I can’t count how many times I have walked into a kitchen to see a prep cook just lop off the tops of tomatoes, zucchini, strawberries, and carrots; or haphazardly trim the rind from melons or citrus fruits, without any thought as to how to get the best yield from that product, let alone the amount of waste they are generating. This trim waste just gets thrown into the compost bin and then out the back door it goes--it’s crazy!

Most chefs assume that the cooks they hire have the necessary skills to prep and fabricate product. In many cases, this is not the truth. Cooks need to be properly trained to prep and fabricate a wide variety of produce, meats, poultry, fish, and seafood. It is essential not only for a chef to be concerned with the cost of the avoidable food waste, but also the impact this waste has on the environment as all the resources used to bring that product into the kitchen have also been wasted.

So what can a chef do to improve the knife skills of the kitchen team and reduce the amount avoidable food waste?

As a chef I have had actual nightmares about running out of food. The kind of nightmares that wake you up in a sweat, with your heart beating out of your chest. The panic, the fear, the thought of facing angry customers because you are out of a menu favorite. Yep, the fear is real for chefs. With the relatively new voice of the consumer via social media—Yelp, Instagram, Facebook, blogs etc.—the chef and the restaurant are under constant scrutiny. And for many chefs, the backlash that can come from the public for an item being out on a menu far outweighs the logical thinking of just ordering what you need.

There are multiple reasons that a restaurant might have to “86” a menu item. Sometimes, there are restaurant menu items that aren’t supposed to last all service. It could be an new item on the restaurant’s menu that they are assessing if it sells, they may have gotten a great deal from a vendor on a limited amount of a product, or the item is seasonal and in limited supply. These types of menu items are usually communicated to the wait staff prior to service so they know for example if there are only 20 orders of this or 30 orders of that. As the service progresses, and these items are ordered, chances are the guests coming in later in the service won’t have the option to order these items.

Sometimes—and this does happen more that you would think—the product that was delivered is either spoiled or not up to the quality standards the restaurant expects. The chef has already planned the menu for the service and the product is not up to par and they are either faced with a quick menu change or just to tell guests that product is not available. If the chef can’t run to the store quickly to get a replacement, he/she is forced to do the latter.

A final reason the restaurant might run out of a particular menu item is one of the rarest cases, but it does happen--poor planning. No chef ever wants to run out, but it does happen. They misorder something or forget to order something. Or, just out of the blue, the reservations just come in quicker than expected and there is no time to order or prep a particular item. Overall poor kitchen management, but definitely possible in any restaurant.

All of this leads to a situation that no chef wants to face—an angry or disappointed guest because the item they want is unavailable. The amount a flak a restaurant can receive via social media for being out of an item is incredible, and in very rare circumstances, can cost a chef their job. This type of pressure leads to a typical practice of overbuying product so as not to EVER be out of an item on the menu. Overbuying typically leads to excess food waste. The chef would rather have wasted food than not have enough. It’s a vicious cycle and a fine line that the chef must walk as to not run out, but then again not have too much.

So what can a chef do to lessen the possibility of running out of product?
Here are some practices that every chef can put into place to help with the balance of running out versus overbuying: