FOCUS CATERING
sta to develop some of the most creative
and e ective 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
32 FEBRUARY 2020
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 postconsumer
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 so ware, 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 so ware highlighted
over-production as the main factor to
address, so the team adapted their o er
accordingly.
Toms warns that: “Changing people’s
habits, both in terms of catering sta 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 e ective 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.”
REFERENCE NOTES
1 www.wrap.org.uk/content/guardians-grub-crusade-beat-food-waste
2 https://wrap.org.uk/content/courtauld-commitment-2025-milestone-progress-report
3 Reducing Food Loss and Waste: Setting a Global Action Agenda: www.wri.org/publication/reducing-food-loss-andwaste
setting-global-action-agenda
4 https://wrap.org.uk/sites/files/wrap/Food_ per cent20surplus_and_waste_in_the_UK_key_facts_Jan_2020.pdf
5 https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/765914/
resources-waste-strategy-dec-2018.pdf
/reducing-food-loss-and-waste-setting-global-action-agenda
/courtauld-commitment-2025-milestone-progress-report
/guardians-grub-crusade-beat-food-waste
/Food_ per cent20surplus_and_waste_in_the_UK_key_facts_Jan_2020.pdf
/resources-waste-strategy-dec-2018.pdf
