Six reasons why you should measure your food waste
‘You get what you inspect, not what you expect’. This simple adage, loosely based on a quote by former chairman of IBM Louis V. Gerstner, Jr, is fundamental in managing a business and leading people
In our experience, many food production businesses do not know how much food they are wasting, who is wasting it, the reasons for the wastage or in some cases, what counts as food waste.
Why should a business measure its food waste? This is one of the first questions we get asked when we introduce the Chefs Eye food waste measurement system to potential clients.
It’s a great question, and one we think about all the time. But first, let’s consider the act of measuring food waste. After all.. it is just that: measuring. Weighing. Counting.
OK, we admit that Chefs Eye Tech also photographs the waste, and builds trends and statistics on a dashboard so you can drill down further into the data. But you can start with a clipboard.
Once you have captured that data, the next step is up to you. But which step is the right one for you and your business? If you have ever used a map for directions, you first need to know where you are before you can plot a route to a destination.
So, if your destination is to REDUCE your food waste, or COST IT into your budget, or even LEARN FROM IT for training… then you have to take steps to start that journey. But before you can take that first step to a solution, you have to understand the problem as it is now.
With that in mind, here are six reasons to measure your food waste:
Ask yourself one question: do you REALLY know what is in that bin being carried out by the kitchen porter at the end of service?
• To know where your costs are going
As the globe pulls out of mass confinement like a bear from hibernation, your business will have to fundamentally re-think where every penny from your cashflow is going.
Every dirham, rupee or dollar spent on salary, utilities, refurbishment, cleaning products etc will need to be justified like never before. And your cost of food is no different.
Ask yourself one question: do you REALLY know what is in that bin being carried out by the kitchen porter at the end of service?
If you don’t, then most likely you are not in full control of the costs within your business.
• To learn and adapt
“Culture eats strategy for breakfast” is a famous quote from legendary management consultant and writer Peter Drucker.
To be clear he didn't mean that strategy was unimportant – rather that a powerful and empowering culture was a surer route to organisational success.
We asked the Executive Chef of one of Londons largest hotels what was the biggest change he saw after implementing our food waste measurement system in his kitchen.
His reply really surprised us: “It has changed the mindset of my team”. Expanding on this point, he went on to say that his team “had changed from a culture of wastage to a culture of saving”.
To give you an idea of what that means in his operation, consider this: everyday his brigade of chefs prepare quantities of food that are simply mind-boggling to most households and many small businesses, with hundreds of kilos of pineapple, or melon, or perhaps mashed potato as required for the daily menus. In that environment, it is easy to become blasé about perfectly edible food ending up in the bin.
After all, what difference is a kilogram of fresh pineapple when it is mixed in with 200 kilograms of pineapple skins? There are two ways of looking at this:
A pineapple a day in food waste equates to 365 pineapples in a year… potentially thrown in the bin by careless or uninformed chefs.
To put it another way, here’s an exercise to try at home: Pop up to your nearest supermarket and buy one pineapple. Take it home. Using a serrated knife, trim off the outer skin. Dice up the juicy flesh. Now take the core, the peelings and the juicy pineapple and throw the whole lot in the bin. How did that feel?
Here’s the thing: without realising it, there are chefs all over the world doing this every day. And before you say it.. blame isn’t the point here. Awareness is.
• To show how much your business ‘adds value’
A 2016 study by CONE Communications found that 64pc of millennials won’t take a job at a company that doesn’t have strong social business responsibility practices.
And by 2025, that generation of workers will make up three-quarters of the workforce.
Many of our clients are Foodservice Caterers contracted to feed those same employees, and are constantly looking for ways to ‘add value’ to their clients, or win new ones.
The introduction of food waste measurement is a tremendous opportunity to demonstrate added value and in turn, help clients deliver on their respective CSR commitments.
This transparency will help your clients to be more accountable to a millennial generation where commitment to food waste reduction and sustainability is a big win for everyone.
Winning over millennials today can help win new clients tomorrow.
• To change customer attitudes to food waste
Did you know that 34% of food wasted in restaurants is scraped off customers plates?
Food left over on plates is like walking by a cluttered desk so often, you don’t see the clutter any more. We see so much plate waste, that we don’t even think about it. (And if you think it’s OK because it has already been paid for. Well it has, by you!)
As we highlighted in a previous article What do you mean "we don't have any food waste"?, plate waste is an invisible cost to every food business which requires the buy-in from customers to change. And getting this buy-in is going to be a challenge.
In the same way that smoking went from hero to zero in terms of appeal, this will take cultural, generational and moral shifts in attitudes to change universally.
But the conversation starts with awareness.
Among our clients, some leading companies are empowering their hospitality teams to address the issue of plate waste directly with customers who queue up in the restaurant everyday.
Chefs Eye have hosted Food Waste Awareness Days where diners are encouraged to measure their leftover food to tally up the cost and quantity. This has made a huge difference in changing attitudes - both at work in the staff restaurant and back home when they cook for their families.
“Climate change has become a defining factor in companies’ long-term prospects”
• Because climate change (really) matters
In January 2020 Larry Fink, Chairman and CEO of BlackRock wrote in his annual letter to CEOs that “Climate change has become a defining factor in companies’ long-term prospects”.
According the Harvard Business Review:
Although BlackRock cannot divest of companies in its index funds, Fink makes it clear that they will be “increasingly disposed to vote against management and board directors when companies are not making sufficient progress on sustainability-related disclosures and the business practices and plans underlying them.”
This is a warning from the world’s largest shareholder that public companies cannot ignore. It also brings together three corporate roles that have rarely been in the same room: finance, investor relations, and sustainability.
And that moves the needle for every business, no matter how big or small.
So what does food waste have to do with climate change?
If food loss and waste were it’s own country, it would be the third highest emitter of carbon emissions.
Measuring food waste will help a business understand the impact it has on climate change, and on the bottom line. That transparency creates awareness, and awareness translates to empowerment.
It is no accident that our mission statment ar Chefs Eye is to empower chefs to waste less food.
Ask any chef running a busy kitchen and he will concur that you get what you inspect, not what you expect - it is why recipes are used to ensure consistent standards of flavour and presentation.
The best recipes start with accurately and diligently measuring ingredients. Isn’t it time you make food waste measurement the recipe for success your business needs today?
