It’s the frustrating reality of many restaurants: notoriously low profit margins paired with high amounts of food waste. With around 60 percent of restaurants going out of business within their first year restaurateurs should have an eye on their food waste from day one if they want to maximize potential profits.
To increase your chances of succeeding in the hospitality industry, there are a few things you can do to start cutting back on the food your restaurant is wasting today. These tips will save you time and money immediately and into the future as well.
A quick and easy way to cut down on food waste in your restaurant is to start by identifying what you’re actually throwing away.
Are there certain patterns you’re noticing? For example, are most of your dishes coming back with leftovers? Are there certain dishes where the sides aren’t being eaten at all?
By tracking your trash and picking up on the consumption habits of your customers you will be able to make decisions about the best approach to reduce your leftover food waste. For example, perhaps you offer a soup and sandwich lunch dish that comes with a side of greens, but the greens always come back to the kitchen uneaten. An immediate change to reduce waste would be to eliminate the greens from this particular dish or provide them as an add-on or substitution option.
Asking for customer feedback is also key as you might uncover that the greens that are continuously going untouched are just not as tasty as you think.
We’ve all been there – having a plate put in front of us with more food on it than we would eat in a typical day. This is not a great experience for the customer who will most likely be tempted to overeat and a worse situation for the restaurant owner who will end up tossing the excess straight into the trash. Reducing your portion sizes and utilizing smaller plates is a great and quick way to reduce unnecessary waste.
Trimming a couple of inches off of your plate sizes won’t leave your customers feeling stiffed— in fact, you may find the opposite to be true as smaller plates will appear to have more food per serving.
Let your chef get creative and turn what would soon be wasted or spoiled food into delicious weekly specials.
Perhaps you have some leftover vegetable stocks in the kitchen or several cartons of cream that is approaching its expiry date. Whatever the case, be proactive about identifying your soon-to-be spoiled food and include it in your daily or weekly specials. By re-thinking what you normally consider waste you can turn your next week’s trash into today’s profit.
Take a look at your menu right now. Are you using locally sourced, in-season produce?
While consistency is the golden rule of restaurants, this doesn’t mean you can’t switch out ingredients or menu items based on what’s in season— in fact, you should.
In addition to the fact that it’s cheaper to buy peak-season produce, local seasonal produce will last longer because it won’t be traveling across the country or world before it arrives in your kitchen. A longer shelf life means less likelihood of waste.
Big menus are a big waste of money. Not only does a big menu take longer for customers to comb through, meaning table turnover times will be longer than they should be, but a large menu also requires more inventory leading to more waste.
Unused inventory due to infrequently ordered items ultimately ends up spoiled and in the trash. Rather than overwhelming your customers with choices and tossing food, consider giving your menu a healthy trim.
Overbuying food is expensive and wasteful. To avoid this, utilize your restaurant POS system to track your inventory and sales reports.
By analyzing your inventory and sales reports in your POS you can tell: What items you’re selling the most, what you’re selling the least of, the quantity of the items you are selling, your most popular dish, how quickly inventory is moving through your restaurant, what you are currently overstocking, etc.
Use your reports to help you answer the above questions, and then plan your purchase orders around your previous season’s demand. Planning in advance will help you forecast your restaurant’s inventory needs, and lessen the output of food waste.
Improper storage conditions lead to premature spoilage and food that is potentially dangerous to consume. In order to avoid wasting food due to improper storage, follow these guidelines.
Simple things such as sealing liquid containers and ensuring your refrigerators and freezers are set to the optimal temperatures will reduce food spoilage. Labeling your food so you know not only what you have in stock, but also how old it is will enable you to select older foods first so they don’t end up going bad.
At the end of the day, running a restaurant is just like running any other business. If you make smart, well-informed decisions then your chances of success are higher. Reducing your restaurant’s food waste is a great starting point because it will lead to lower costs and increased profits. And besides, you have nothing to lose by implementing these suggestions, except for your restaurant’s food waste!
♦ By RMagazine
