10 ways restaurants can reduce food waste

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. 

Many restaurant businesses utilise  food waste management software so they don’t need to worry about the manual task load of recording waste regularly and can review food waste in real-time rather than at the end of the week or month. 

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. Think about ordering perishable items in smaller quantities more frequently to help reduce fresh produce reaching its expiry date. 

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. 

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 

It’s also important to monitor sales to find out your most and least popular dishes. By eliminating unpopular dishes – especially where they include uncommon ingredients – you can reduce waste. Software that allows you to monitor sales in relation to the cost of ingredients can help you identify the most and least profitable items on your menu as well, so if you have an unpopular and expensive dish to make – this is the one you can cut from your menu.  

8. Adjust your menu 

Customer leftovers account for a significant amount of waste generated in restaurants, and identifying ways to reduce it can save you money. Consider reducing portion sizes or making some adjustments to your menu – such as offering different sizes of items, for example, smaller appetite portion sizes as well as a regular portion size or offering large and small portions of sides. If you are generating a lot of food waste, you may need to think about reducing the number of dishes on your menu or getting creative and making more dishes from multi-use ingredients. 

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.