Eco-Friendly Restaurant Guide: Lower Food Costs & Waste

Sustainability. It’s a buzzword for every restaurant owner and manager. But dealing with the day-to-day chaos of running a restaurant often leaves little energy for sustainable practices. And a lot of them seem to cost money. Who’s got the budget for going green if it costs green? It’s true that some practices require an investment, if not financial, then of time. But chew on this: restaurants that invest in reducing food waste save about $7 for every $1 they spend. In other words, an investment today means profit down the road.

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Not only that, but your customers, particularly Millennials, are willing to pay a premium for sustainable products and services. As you adopt more sustainable practices in your restaurant, you can market that fact and adjust prices to cover your costs. And the benefit goes beyond what your business can save or earn. In the US alone, reducing food waste by just 20% can have the following impact in one year:

• Create $2 billion in business profit
• Save consumers $6 billion
• Recover 1.8 billion meals
• Create 15,000 jobs
• Conserve 1.6 trillion gallons of water
• Reduce 18 million tons of greenhouse gas emissions

ReFED, a nonprofit committed to reducing food waste, uses the EPA’s Food Recovery Hierarchy to rank the best ways to fight it. In this eco-friendly restaurant guide, we’ll explore three tiers of that framework (Prevention, Recovery, and Recycling), plus other ways to make your restaurant more sustainable, lower food costs, and cut food waste.

Prevention

Every year, 63 million tons of food is wasted in the US alone. That’s spread across farms, industries, and households, but foodservice and retail account for 40% of it. That’s a shame, because so much of it can be prevented. Even dealing with food waste is expensive: the US spends over $218 billion growing, processing, transporting, and disposing of food that never gets eaten.

These numbers are startling, but they’re also easy to ignore. After all, how much could your little restaurant really add to the problem? More than you’d think. The average restaurant wastes half a pound of food for every meal served.

Preventing food waste keeps it out of landfills, lowers your costs, lets you pass savings on to customers, and helps the environment. Here are some strategies to get started.

1. Use Every Ingredient

If you plan your dishes ahead, you can get the most out of every ingredient so none goes to waste. Look at all the components of a recipe and find ways to use each ingredient in more than one dish. You might use the white ends of leeks for a side dish and toss the tops. Get creative instead: the tops can go into vegetable stock or become a garnish. Dried-out rolls from the bread basket can become croutons. Extra meat from one recipe can go into a soup. It takes some creativity to minimize food waste, but you might end up with a new best seller.

2. Reduce Portions

If you’ve done food cost calculations, you know your recipe cost is based on specific portions of each ingredient. Over-portion even a little and you throw off both the recipe and your profit per dish, so teach your kitchen staff to portion properly with scales and measuring tools.

Sometimes, though, the portion itself is bigger than guests need. If plates keep coming back to the kitchen with a big chunk of one dish untouched, you’re probably over-serving. Pare it back a little and you’ll cut that dish’s food cost and its food waste. A recipe tool built into your restaurant management software can help you set the right portions and track food waste.

3. Plan Your Daily Special

Know what perishables you have in the kitchen, and create daily specials that use up anything that’ll go bad within a few days. Over-ordered shrimp that won’t last another day? Make it the special: shrimp scampi, shrimp tacos, or fried shrimp. A limited-time dish gets attention, sells faster, and keeps you from dumping shrimp that’s gone bad.

4. Make the Most of Your Inventory Management Software

Inventory software helps you stay on top of the ingredients you have on hand, so you never run out and never have to throw old food away. Set par levels so you’re alerted before you run low, and log waste so you know the true food cost of every dish.

Keep your inventory process running smoothly, too. With inventory management software, that should be simple: every time a dish is ordered through your POS, its ingredients come off your inventory automatically. It’s still important to count your full inventory once a month and key items weekly so you know your actual usage.

5. Buy in Bulk

Buying in bulk isn’t just cheaper. It also cuts the packaging you have to throw away or recycle. Think about an order of meat: individual plastic vacuum packs, inside a large plastic bag, inside a cardboard box. Or 25 individual bottles of olive oil versus one large tin. Every product you order comes with waste, so cut it where you can by buying in bulk, paying attention to packaging, and working with vendors that try to minimize waste.

6. Control Disposable Flow

We’ve all seen it: a guest pulls one napkin from the dispenser and two dozen come out. They’re probably not going back in. Give out a set number of napkins with each order to control both napkin costs and waste, and keep disposable serviceware behind the counter so you control distribution.

For takeout, ask guests if they need utensils, napkins, or sauce instead of adding them by default. Put sugar, oil, salt, and pepper in reusable glass containers instead of single-use packets. And if you want napkins available in the dining area, use a dispenser that really does give out one at a time.

Recovery

The next tier of the hierarchy is Recovery. What you do with the food you have left can keep it out of landfills.

7. Donate it to a Charity

Consider this: 49 million Americans struggle to put food on the table. Donating food you can’t use to food banks prevents food waste and feeds people in your community. There’s a tax incentive, too: as long as you donate to a qualified 501(c)(3) not-for-profit, you can write off those donations.

8. Feed Animals

Sometimes leftover food isn’t fit for people. In that case, you can donate it to farms to feed animals. Companies like GrubTubs turn restaurant food scraps into affordable, sustainable animal feed for local farms. That eases the strain on agriculture by reducing the amount of feed needed to raise those animals. It also cuts the time you spend separating scraps from your waste stream and lowers hauling costs, since your trash weighs less.

Recycling

The final tier is Recycling. Most restaurants already recycle, but there’s usually room to improve. And since recycling costs about half as much per pound as trash, there’s a financial reason to get your process right.

It can be as simple as posting signs in both the back and front of house showing how to sort waste into trash, recycling, and compost, with pictures of exactly what goes in each bin. Stepping up recycling can divert 2.6 million tons of waste from landfills and cut CO2 emissions by 1.9 million tons.

9. Minimize Package & Service Ware Waste

Food isn’t the only thing restaurants waste. According to ReFED’s Food Waste Action Guide, 72% of restaurants buy at least some packaging and supplies made from recycled material, and 30% buy at least some compostable products. There’s still a long way to go: discarded packaging makes up 23% of landfill waste.

Switching to recyclable or compostable disposable serviceware is an easy place to start. Changing products or suppliers sounds time-consuming, but a quick email asking your current supplier to quote sustainable alternatives for what you already buy takes little effort and can pay off.

You can also cut back on plastic gloves. Follow your local food code: use them where they’re required, like when handling ready-to-eat foods, and skip them for tasks that don’t call for them.

10. Compost

Once trendy, composting has become a part of many restaurants’ practices. Check with your hauler to see if they provide composting services, and find out what can be composted (some accept meat and compostable packaging, while others don’t). Simply place a composting bin in the kitchen where it’s easy to dump scraps in, and educate your kitchen staff about what can and can’t go in there. If you don’t have a garden at your restaurant, consider donating the compost to a local community garden or hiring a service like Dallas-based Turn Compost, which provides composting bins to restaurants and then picks them up when they’re full. The scraps are given to farmers, who then use it to create compost they use to grow their crops.

11. Audit Your Recycling

You may think that your staff is doing a great job of recycling, but you won’t know until you dig through your trash and recycle bins. You may find that your employees consistently don’t recycle one particular packaging type because they’re unaware that it can be recycled. A quick in-house training on what can and can’t be recycled boosts adoption, and back-of-house signs with clear pictures help it stick.

12. Recycle Cooking Oil

As we become more aware of how our consumption of natural resources is taxing the planet, we’re also coming up with innovative solutions to find alternative options. Your old cooking oil can become biofuel, which is better for the environment and doesn’t impact global warming.

13. Upcycle What You Can

Recycling isn’t the only way to keep packaging out of the landfill. Many restaurants are finding creative ways to upcycle it. BURGER FI,, a fast-casual burger concept, used more than 700,000 milk jugs to make tables for its locations and more than 150,000 Coca-Cola bottles to make chairs. There’s no limit to your options here. Use plastic crates for gardens, make paper from cardboard waste, or send your recyclables to a brand that turns them into clothing or accessories.

Environmental Awareness

We’d like to add a few other categories to the tips for how to make your restaurant more sustainable, beginning with environmental awareness because sustainability isn’t just about minimizing food waste or recycling: it’s also about reducing the natural resources and energy you use in your restaurant. Speaking of energy: did you realize that 35% of your restaurant’s energy consumption goes into food prep? After that, your HVAC, sanitation, lighting, and refrigeration take up the rest of the energy pie. While you certainly can’t do without any of these components, there are ways you can conserve energy.

14. Invest in High-Efficiency Systems

If you’re of the “if it ain’t broke” school of thought, you may be limping along with a still-functioning but highly-inefficient HVAC system. Yes, it costs money to update this, but the long-term cost savings make it well worth the investment. The good news is that there are tax incentives for going green with your heating and cooling systems. This can offset the sticker shock if the budget is beyond what you expected. Keep in mind that your energy bills should immediately be lower, so you’ll quickly recuperate your expenses in those cost savings. When shopping for equipment, always look for Energy Star rated products.

15. Use Smarter Lighting

This is a relatively simple and affordable way to go green quickly. Replace incandescent bulbs with Energy Star rated LEDs, even in your restaurant signage, exit signs, and other less obvious lit areas. Install motion sensor lighting in restrooms, and daylight sensors in the dining area so that you’re not constantly managing lighting conditions manually.

16. Control Water Flow

Water is another resource that may be wasted without sustainable measures in place. Your kitchen staff might be adept at only turning on the faucet when they need it, but what about your public restroom where a child might leave the faucet on to overflow for an hour before someone catches it? Install low flow as well as touchless faucets so that water only comes on when a guest needs it. Dual flush toilets give guests the option of a little or a lot of water with their flush and can reduce water waste.

17. Buy Used When You Can

It may not be necessary that all the furniture, fixtures, and decor for your restaurant be brand new, and buying used puts less tax on the environment (not to mention your budget). Look for restaurant auctions to get great deals on tables, chairs, bars, and equipment. If you’re in the design process, consider using reclaimed wood as part of the plan. Not only is it sustainable to use wood from dismantled furniture or buildings, but it also tells a story. Imagine your customers’ delight when you tell them that the bar they’re sitting at once was used in a train station in Santa Fe!

18. Hire Green Cleaners

Here’s something you might overlook in your quest for sustainability: how your restaurant is cleaned. Harsh chemicals like Volatile Organic Compounds are commonly used to clean restaurants, but these all too easily end up in waterways where they kill plant and marine life. There are certified green cleaning companies you can hire that will use environmentally safe cleaning products that will get your restaurant sparkling without harming the planet.

19. Get Employees on Board

You may only have a handful of employees and think their environmental footprint is tiny. But every shift, each one probably drinks from a disposable cup and maybe eats off a disposable plate. Giving them reusable dishes is an easy, affordable fix.

Teach your staff ways to be kinder to the planet at work and at home, and keep them involved so they feel like they’re contributing to their community and the environment.

Reward good behavior, too. Run a quarterly contest for the best idea to make the restaurant more sustainable, and give the winner a gift card or a paid day off. You can also set goals (“reduce our waste by 50%”) and post a scoreboard where everyone can track progress.

20. Find Sustainable Sourcing

McDonald’s is just one brand who has committed to combat deforestation by switching to more sustainable sources for packaging. Though your restaurant doesn’t have nearly the global impact that McDonald’s does, you can still make an effort to invest in materials that are recyclable and sustainable. Not only can you elect to buy sustainable products but you can also choose to work with vendors that use minimal or recycled packaging. This communicates your commitment to better practices, which, in turn, helps change the tide for how restaurant vendors practice their business.

Sustainable and Ethical Food Sources

Food costs are likely your highest expense, and while sustainable and ethical food sources don’t come cheap, you are making an investment in the planet that will pay you back in goodwill.

21. Care About Where Your Food Comes From (Because Your Customers Do)

Many diners seek restaurants that, like Chipotle, are committed to working with farmers who raise crops and animals in a sustainable and humane manner. In fact, 86% of Millennials want restaurants to be more transparent about where their food comes from, how it’s harvested, and what attributes the ingredients have.Chipotle uses non-GMO, pesticide-free ingredients and pasture-raised and hormone-free animals, and its customers appreciate these efforts. Your best bet is to get to know your food sources. Visit the farms. See how crops are grown and animals are raised. Choose farms that align with your beliefs about what’s good for the environment and for your restaurant.

22. Only Serve What’s in Season

An out-of-season watermelon costs a lot, and much of that is the fuel to ship it from far away. In summer, watermelon is plentiful, cheap, and probably grown much closer to you. Serving what’s in season lowers your costs and your carbon footprint. Plus, in-season produce just tastes better. Build your menu around what’s plentiful right now.

23. Leverage Local

The less distance your produce and meat has to travel, the fewer emissions the transportation to get it to you is putting into the atmosphere. Also, sourcing from local farms is a great way to support your community and it makes it easy for you to visit or get involved with that resource.

Conclusion

Becoming more sustainable is a gradual process, but it’s one that will pay for itself hundredfold. Solutions like these suggestions provide restaurants with nearly $620 million in business profit potential each year (ReFed). What could you do with a little more profit?

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