Love food hate waste

FM Lucy Hind, Head of Property at Barnsley Council, adds that it’s essential there is open dialogue between clients and contractors. Discussions, she advises, “should not just be around food as the item, but the impacts of the delivery of food and the way food is packaged, all of which equate to the waste conundrum.”

Simone Fenton-Jarvis has some key tips for FMs:

• Involve the clients and stakeholders – hold interactive workshops and include different levels of the organisation.
• Communicate your company stance, the reasons why, the impact and how it benefits them.
• Engage – collect regular feedback and then feedback to your clients and stakeholders the levels of waste versus employee experience.

Says Mistry: “I’d like to start with the fact that the UK food service industry wastes one million tonnes of food every year, enough to fill the Shard 11 times over. The scale is vast. One of the United Nations’ sustainable development goals is the reduction of food waste, and that’s because it feeds back into food inequality. There are people going hungry across the world, even though the world produces enough to feed everyone. If we created less waste, there would be more food available at fair prices for those who go hungry.

“The other side to the environmental factor is that food that goes into landfill degrades and produces methane, a greenhouse gas, which then adds to global warming. The alternative is to put that food into anaerobic digestion and produce energy from it. However, reducing waste is a far better option than recycling it.”

Biggs agrees that while reducing food waste is the most important step, what happens to the waste is another. With the government’s ambition to eliminate food waste being sent to landfill by 2030(4), this should not be viewed as a CSR benefit, but rather a call for action.

“However,” he cautions, “when it comes to removing food waste, part of the challenge can be budget. We all know food waste should never be sent to landfill, but alternatives can be costly. Aside from composting, the eco-friendliest way of disposing of food waste is through anaerobic digestion (AD), which involves the use of microorganisms to break down waste in an enclosed area. The methane emitted is then collected and used to create biogas, which can help generate electricity or heat. With this in mind, food waste can be a great source of renewable energy.

“However, let’s not forget that the cost of removing waste is typically done by weight, so the less waste produced the more affordable it becomes to dispose of. Ensuring a strict policy of segregation of food waste will inevitably lower the weight and potentially make it more affordable for an organisation to do.”

IMPLEMENTING A POLICY
Svab says that prevention is a key step in addressing food waste, so begin by looking at ways of preventing unnecessary food waste in the first place. “With 30 per cent of crops never leaving farms because they don’t look perfect or are the wrong size, a couple of years ago Sodexo partnered with Waste Knot – an organisation committed to connecting businesses with surplus food.

“Through Waste Knot we have built a relationship with Ferryfast, a co-operative of farmers in Worcestershire and successfully implemented Wasteful to Tasteful, a scheme where our catering teams can order boxes of fruit and vegetables which would otherwise have been wasted. Just over a year in and 230-plus of our catering sites are receiving the boxes on a weekly basis, which has saved almost 130 tonnes of fruit and vegetables which would otherwise have gone to waste.

“This scheme not only helps prevent food waste at farm level but enables and inspires our chefs to create more plant-based dishes, which are growing in popularity as more and more people are adopting a flexitarian diet.”

Hind advises that FMs and their caterers “start small and get creative. Early adoption with a small-scale pilot allows caterers to trial solutions and develop the scope of a programme over time, from buying local and menus according to seasons, giving adequate time for peer learning, to engagement and results production. This allows catering staff to develop some of the most creative and effective strategies to combat waste that is aligned to the service provision required. Caterers can also learn from past experiences and scale up solutions quickly through shared experience.”

She also advises that FMs look at ways to reduce overproduction. “Countless sites have at least one menu item that is a nice to have but is under-consumed; instead, consider seasons and the availability of food at a local level. Through discussions with clients, menus can be changed and optimised by producing smaller quantities, meaning sites can reduce waste without negatively impacting the client service and experience.”

Mistry says that chefs need the freedom to use their skills to lead the food waste reduction progress, which means it is key to get to know the customers, understand the trends in consumption volumes and which foods are popular. “At Vacherin, our chef development team conducts regular visits to our site locations to see what food is going to waste. Once the kitchen team knows this, they can stop making as much of that option and the development team can find another use for those ingredients.

“Communication is so important,” she says. “Account managers also need to be able to sell the benefits of reducing food waste and communicate why we are making the choices we are. It might be that we don’t refill a section of that salad bar near the end of service, and we need to explain to customers that we are making an active decision to avoid food waste.”

For Blue Apple Catering, the area where they find they can achieve the largest impact on food waste reduction, is of course in the kitchen itself.

Says Toms: “Making an individual in each kitchen responsible for the monitoring of food waste, a sort of food waste Tsar, is a good move and does not necessarily have to be the Head Chef. It can be a great development tool to give this responsibility to an apprentice or junior member of the kitchen team.

“Teaching Chefs how to trim, cut and re-purpose kitchen ingredients is one part of this, as well as using historical customer patronage data to ensure overproduction is minimised.”

MEASURING SUCCESS
It’s also important for organisations to measure their food waste reduction programmes on an ongoing basis. For example, Sodexo uses a data-driven solution which addresses both pre- and post-consumer wastage. Fenton-Jarvis advises FMs to use a process of target-measure-act. This means “having a mission statement and policy which sets your intentions and ensuring you measure the number of users and waste where it occurs.”

For its part, Bartlett Mitchell employs food waste reduction software, Chefs Eye, which helps its sites take control of their food waste – monitoring and managing what is being wasted. At one banking client site, Chefs Eye was used to help save an average of £500 in the first three months and achieve a 200 per cent ROI. The software highlighted over-production as the main factor to address, so the team adapted their offer accordingly.

Toms warns that: “Changing people’s habits, both in terms of catering staff and customers, is the hardest part, but it can be achieved and don’t be surprised to see wastage increase to begin with. This is because what wasn’t measured before now is and this can skew the results somewhat and in fact shows the operation was probably wasting more than was previously thought.”

Finally, Biggs advises: “For any policy to be effective it needs to be embraced, top to bottom, throughout the whole organisation. But achieving a policy does not mean continual change or work as once the necessary ways of working are in place it should become silent running.

“There is plenty of technology available that can help organisations better understand their waste streams and implement new ways of working – quite simply, it comes down to the old adage ‘what gets checked, gets done.’ In reality, having a policy is the easy part; living by it is where the challenge really starts.”