How to reduce food waste in restaurants: 10 actionable steps for 2025
Food waste in restaurants is no longer just an environmental issue; it is a direct threat to restaurant profitability. In the UK alone, restaurants throw away around 199,100 tonnes of food every year, worth an estimated £682 million to the sector - money quite literally going into the bin.
It's something we hear a lot here at Access Hospitality. Our customers often identify food waste as an issue that is costing their business money – but how easy a problem is restaurant food waste to solve?
This is what we're going to look into in this article - the easy ways you can control and reduce food waste in your restaurant operation and protect your profits.
Why do we need to reduce food waste in restaurants?
According to a report by Champions 12.3, a unique international coalition committed to tackling food waste, a third of all food produced in the world is lost or wasted. This has serious ramifications on the environment (waste that ends up in landfills produces a large amount of methane, contributing to global warming) as well as on our finances. Wasting a third of the world’s food equals $940 billion in economic losses annually.
A report carried out in 2023 by Waste Managed UK, an industry involved in waste collection, recycling, and landfill management, highlighted that restaurants and cafes in the UK throw away 920k tonnes of food every year. This number accounts for approximately 10% of total food waste in the UK.
Fortunately, many restaurants in the UK have made progress in managing their food waste. The latest food waste legislation requires companies to change how they handle and dispose of food waste. Environmentally sustainable places are also more popular, with 24% of customers willing to pay more.
Therefore, reducing food waste makes good business sense, as well as helping the environment.
Sources of food waste in restaurants
Food waste in hospitality comes from various sources and can vary widely depending on the type of organisation. The waste coming from the kitchen of a fast-food restaurant will be different than the hotel’s breakfast buffet or a fine dining restaurant.
Here are some of the most common causes of food waste in restaurants that make a good starting point for making improvements:
- Over-ordering & spoilage - Many kitchens feel like it’s better to be over-prepared than under-prepared, planning their orders manually. This can lead to a massive discrepancy between what is needed and what ends up wasted, especially if they're not following the FIFO method (first in, first out).
- Customer leftovers - A study on restaurants in the UK indicated that as much as 30% of food waste comes from customer leftovers, which may suggest that typical portion sizes are too big.
- Overproduction - Overproduction of pre-prepared items accounts for a huge 65% of waste in restaurants, according to the same study.
- Human error - Orders that are taken incorrectly or food sent back to the kitchen due to being overcooked, or a mistake in preparation are all common occurrences in fast-paced restaurant environments that contribute to waste.
10 ways to reduce food waste in restaurants
Whether you run a small café, a large restaurant, or any other type of hospitality business, identifying the causes of food waste can be challenging. To help, we've compiled a list of 10 effective strategies to reduce waste in your business and protect your profits.
1. Record waste
Keeping track of food waste helps you understand how much food is being wasted, how much it's costing you, and how big of a problem it is for your business. It also gives you a starting point to measure how well your new ways of cutting down on waste are working.
Begin with a one‑week audit that weighs and logs every scrap by type (prep, spoilage, plate) and reason (over‑prep, off‑cuts, etc.). A cloud food waste management system like Access Procure Wizard automates weighing, coding and reporting, so chefs aren’t buried in spreadsheets.
KPIs to track:
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KG waste per cover
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£ cost per cover
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% edible vs inedible
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CO₂‑equivalent impact
2. Look at ordering
Over-ordering, as mentioned before, is a huge driver of unnecessary restaurant food waste, and it’s an easy area to start making changes straight away. Don’t simply re-order the same order every week – closely monitor sales and food waste, so you don’t continuously over-order the same products. Use real‑time stock levels, par alerts and supplier lead‑times to place smaller, more frequent orders. With stock control and inventory management software, orders can be auto‑generated from forecast sales, cutting admin as well as waste.
3. Don't overprepare
Closely track your sales over several weeks or months and then use this information to determine your busiest days of the week/month. Why? So, you can estimate more accurately when it comes to pre-preparing food. Don’t forget to get in touch with local community groups or sign up for an app like Too Good to Go to donate pre-prepared items that end up unused.
4. Store food correctly
All your kitchen staff should know the proper practices for storing, rotating, and labelling food to ensure it is used efficiently and food is not left to expire. Remember to use the FIFO (first in, first out) method to rotate stock and use the oldest items first. To make this a habit, use digital checklists like Trail to ensure daily logs.
5. Train staff
Food safety and storing training is essential for anyone working in a kitchen or handling food, and regular annual refresher training can be useful to ensure standards don’t slip. Training your front-of-house staff also helps you avoid messing up orders.
For example, you can teach your wait staff to repeat orders back to customers and double-check things like allergies or special requests, so dishes don't have to be sent back to the kitchen.
6. Inventory management
Keep an accurate inventory of all the stock you have so that you reduce the instances of overordering or missing expiration dates. Inventory management software is very helpful in managing stock levels in real-time without creating a lot of manual recording and allows every member of staff responsible for ordering to know exactly what’s needed and what isn’t. A digital inventory record also allows you to record data over time to see what items are being recorded as waste the most frequently and enables you to more accurately identify the items contributing to regular food waste.
7. Track sales
Accurate demand forecasts are the single most effective way to stop waste before it starts. By pairing last year’s like‑for‑like covers with real‑time reservations, weather and local‑event data, chefs can order the exact volume that will sell over the next 3–7 days.
How to put it into practice:
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Connect your data sources
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Review the forecast weekly
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Auto‑generate orders
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Track accuracy
KPIs to watch:
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Forecast accuracy (% difference covers forecast vs actual)
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Spoilage £ as % of purchases
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KG waste per cover trendline
8. Adjust your menu
Even the best forecasts can’t eliminate every surplus croissant or salad pot but dynamic pricing turns that “dead stock” into revenue instead of landfill.
Some actionable tactics that you can use to move the short-shelf-life items include:
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Time-based markdowns – you can program your EPoS to drop prices on short‑shelf‑life items after specific cut‑offs (e.g., ‑30 % on sandwiches after 2 p.m.).
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Pushing deals to mobile - Send app notifications or SMS promoting a “Late Happy Hour” for items nearing expiry.
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Bundle creatively. Pair close‑dated items with high‑margin drinks to protect your average transaction value.
9. Repurpose ingredients
If you have stock that’s getting close to its expiry, then this is another opportunity to get creative and repurpose these ingredients into a dish of the day or soup of the day. Updated legislation on calorie labelling states that food that is on a menu for less than 30 consecutive days in total across the year is excluded from the legislation, which makes it easier to be reactive when reducing food waste.
10. Order in season
Fresh food that is out of season has to be transported further, and this often means that it has a shorter shelf life in your kitchen. So, ensuring you always order seasonally will help you to keep fresh food longer and lead to less food waste.
How tech in restaurants can help reduce food waste
Many kitchens aren’t keeping on top of food waste management because the traditional manual methods of monitoring food waste are a time-consuming job, making it very difficult to see and understand how to prevent food waste.
Using the right software in your restaurant, such as our waste management software, part of Access Procure Wizard, can help you record waste as well as understand what has been wasted and why so you can get a better handle on the situation.
The seamless transfer of data in our purchase-to-pay software solution between the food waste module directly into the core food waste management system, including food flash, stock control, and our menu costing solution, provides a full 360° kitchen management solution for restaurants. Technology makes it easy to put a waste reduction plan in place and then monitor the effect on your bottom line.
Ready to stop wasting your time and money?
In this article, we've looked at the many problems restaurants face with food waste and how it hurts the planet, but mainly your profits. We've also shared some easy steps you can take and talked about how technology can help you cut down on waste and save money.
If you’re ready to put food waste management software into action and start saving money in your restaurant, discover more about how our stock control, ordering, menu costing, and waste management purchase-to-pay system can help you. See how you can implement a waste reduction plan to help improve profitability on our wastage demo video.