What is food waste in restaurants?
Food waste, often referred to as food loss is any edible food that goes uneaten at any stage. This ranges from crops that rotted in the field, all the way to food that spoiled in a restaurant kitchen before it could be served. It also includes unfinished meals left on the plate at a restaurant, scraps from preparing a meal, or the spoiled fruit you threw out in your kitchen at the end of the week.
Better Foodservice Equipment Can Reduce Food Waste in Restaurants
One way to reduce food waste in restaurants is to develop and implement foodservice equipment that simply needs fewer resources to produce the same amount of food. A perfect example is the Evolution Elite open fryer from Henny Penny. The fryer was developed to use 40% less oil, while still making the same throughput of a standard fifty-pound vat. Improvements like this in kitchens can mean significant annual dollar savings in oil. It also means that 40% less oil needs to be produced and is tossed at the end of the typical life of oil in a fryer.
Another example is food holding equipment. Most QSRs have specified for each product, how long it can be held for. After this period, the food no longer meets the quality standards for the establishment and must be thrown away. Food waste in restaurants can be reduced with holding cabinets that significantly extend hold times while maintaining quality. This is especially helpful during the slow period between lunch and dinner. Imagine if a restaurant never had to throw away food ever again because it was held too long? How might this affect the bottom line? How might this affect the quality of the offerings and therefore the customer experience?
Better food holding can help significantly to reduce food waste in restaurants. However, it is just a bandage to the bigger problem. That is, producing food when there is not currently customer demand for that product.
Better Process Can Reduce Food Waste in Restaurants
In our article about the Lean Restaurant, we discuss how well-run kitchen operations can run like a factory, borrowing the lean manufacturing concept, and reduce food waste in restaurants. One of the core concepts in the lean kitchen methodology is referred to as “flow.”
The concept of flow is reviewing every operation required between the food delivery truck and the moment the meal is handed off to the customer. Each step is optimized such that food is never waiting (and neither is the customer) at any step. It also means that food is cooked on demand and never held. In a perfect world, it would be possible to streamline operations such that food is cooked on demand, and still delivered to the customer in a timely manner. This would reduce holding requirements, which would in turn reduce food waste in restaurants. To dig into this concept deeper, refer to our article on lean restaurant operations.
New technologies such as whole-kitchen POS systems and the Internet of Things (IoT) can make the lean kitchen possible. A modern whole kitchen POS system means that order entry at the register or on tablets with your wait staff is immediately sent throughout the whole kitchen. Just the idea of passing the order information to the correct parts of the kitchen instantaneously will cut down ticket times by up to 40% according to Toast POS. A well-integrated POS system will not only help aggregate historical data to predict customer demand, but it will also provide information in real-time, and help restaurants identify new trends that could better equip a restaurant to prepare the items customers ask for the most and cut back on items which are less frequently ordered. This would decrease food waste in restaurants and increase throughput. To really reduce food waste in restaurants, whole-kitchen POS alone is not enough.
Restaurant IoT takes this idea a step further. Imagine a connected kitchen where each step is automated or mechanized to a point where the takt time of every meal component is known precisely. Your protein, side dish, and beverages all take different amounts of time and follow different steps to become a part of the complete meal. With this information, it is possible to start each operation such that they all finish at precisely the same time. When good POS and IoT are used together, food never waits at any step and can begin its journey through the kitchen at exactly the moment the customer orders. This streamlined kitchen operation of the future could greatly reduce food waste in restaurants and improve the overall customer experience.
Reducing food waste in restaurants will be a journey. Restaurants and foodservice equipment manufacturers can work together to reduce food waste.
Restaurant equipment manufacturers should be developing IoT capabilities into their equipment now. It will be a long road to full implementation. Any manufacturer who waits to see demand will be too far behind to catch up with the technology.
