The smart way restaurants use the menu to avoid food waste

Food waste is a big problem in restaurants. Estimates show that billions of pounds of food are thrown away in American restaurants each year (via Move For Hunger), negatively impacting businesses and the environment. While some establishments use unconventional methods to combat food waste, such as the restaurant that literally served garbage to its guests, others resort to more conventional, discreet methods. Restaurants can intelligently reuse unused ingredients to create entirely new dishes for their menus, preventing them from throwing away perfectly good food that hasn’t yet reached customers. For example, chefs can easily turn stale bread into croutons and serve with salad.

A discussion on Reddit about how restaurants deal with surplus food provided even more examples. Leftover ingredients from dinner can be incorporated into a soup to be served during lunch or as an appetizer or side dish, while one commenter claimed, “A lot of pastry can be turned into ice cream.” As for leftover proteins, one said former buffet manager: “Much of the meat was used for other products (meatloaf was shredded for spaghetti sauce, fried chicken was shredded for the salad bar/chicken salad).” As long as leftovers are still fresh, there’s no good reason not to use them in new menu items.

When it comes to food waste in restaurants, an estimated 4 to 10% of purchased items do not make it to guests, and of the food that customers receive, 31 to 40% goes uneaten (via The Restaurant). Headquarters). Food waste is a major contributor to climate change because food that ends up in landfills is often buried, and the lack of oxygen in these conditions causes the food to produce methane as it decomposes. Methane is a particularly damaging gas in terms of climate change because its warming effect is more than 80 times greater than that of carbon dioxide when comparing the two gases in the first 20 years after they enter the atmosphere.

The impact of food waste on the environment should be compelling enough to address the problem, but restaurants have a more personal reason for changing their wasteful ways. According to a 2021 study published in Foods, food waste contributes to massive losses worldwide, estimated at $2.6 trillion per year. In addition, chefs are investing in repurposing food due to rising food prices caused by factors such as bird flu, the war in Ukraine and the fallout from a pandemic. In addition to repurposing ingredients to create new menu items, some restaurants are also using smaller portion sizes to reduce food waste and counteract the devastating effects of inflation. Reusing ingredients in this way benefits everyone by ensuring your favorite restaurants stay in business while doing the right thing for the environment.