Food waste reduction at Restaurant De Pleats: Small steps for mankind

Abstract

Every year, large quantities of food are thrown away in the catering industry. Restaurant De Pleats therefore started a pilot study for twelve days to weigh all discarded carrots, chips and bread in order to determine food waste within the company. The management decided to measure three product groups since measuring the total waste would make it difficult to determine which interventions would or would not work. A distinction can be made between pre-consumer and post-consumer waste. Therefore waste from the kitchen and from the restaurant was collected and weighed separately. What stood out was that during the week more fries were thrown away and on the weekend more carrots were discarded. One explanation for this is that on the weekends more families with children are dining in the restaurant. Prevention is the quickest way to reduce food waste. The most important recommendations for interventions are: weigh all portions, reduce portion sizes and calculate the impact of the waste. During the study a change of behaviour was already noticed in the kitchen. Cooks re-used more products and were much more aware of the fact that a few hundred grams of waste per cook per day lead to hundreds of kilos of waste per year.