Food Waste Intelligence

Picture this: you’re the head chef of a foodservice operation, it’s Friday evening, and it’s time to close the kitchen doors for the week and start prepping for the coming one. The thing is, you have a refrigerator full of leftovers from meals earlier in the week, and they’ll undoubtedly go bad. This scenario isn’t unfamiliar to many chefs in large foodservice operations, so what can be done to fix it?

Enter the “Chef’s Choice” station. To avoid tossing these perfectly good leftover ingredients, consider transforming one of your stations into a Chef's Choice station one day a week, like Thursday or Friday. The chef decides what unique dishes can be created using those leftover ingredients, then serves them at the Chef’s Choice station. In addition to encouraging creativity in the kitchen, it will get customers excited to see what the chef has invented that week. And of course, it drives down food waste by saving perfectly edible ingredients from ending up in the garbage.

If foodservice is your industry and you find your operation has a lot of unnecessary waste piling up at the end of the week, why not try adding the Chef’s Choice station?

Thanks to Bill McNamara at SUNY Cortland for sharing this tip with the LeanPath Community! Do you have a waste reduction tip to share with the LeanPath community? Email us!