Different Ways To Reduce Plate Waste!
Plate waste (the food you throw away when you finish eating) is a huge concern for many and an important goal for School Food Service departments (i.e. Compass Group at Northwestern) and those in the food industry in general. Plate waste is the amount of food discarded by students, and at Northwestern, reports indicate that the average student discards around 1 pound of food a day. This may seem like a small number, but given that 52% of our 8,287 students live on campus, that's an average of ~4,300 pounds of plate waste every day! That's over 2 tons!!
You could feed two American adults for an entire year with the amount of waste produced from just 1 day at Northwestern and still have food left over !!
With that in mind, below you'll find a list of 8 different ways to reduce plate waste on both the back and front end.
1. Portion Sizes :: Monitor portion sizes- If your portions are too big for customers to finish, try a portion scale or some portion spoons to make sure everyone is getting an appropriate amount of food. Standardizing recipes is one way of ensuring that every member of a staff is plating the same amount of food every time
2. Manage expectations :: Guests will be less likely to send a dish back if it’s been completely and accurately described on the menu (or lil placard above the food). Make sure your staff can explain every item on the menu and answer any questions (or have more detailed placards)
3. Dish Popularity ::Track the popularity of each dish - If certain menu items are unpopular, you might want to consider adjusting the recipe or removing it from the menu
4. Take out :: Encourage guests to take their food home with them - This is a pretty standard practice at most restaurants. Make sure you keep a variety of disposable containers on hand, so guests can take home whatever they can’t finish. ( isn’t there a take-out system now?
5. Optical Illusions:
- One study found that food served on red plates was often consumed in smaller amounts
- Square-shaped and striped foods were perceived to be larger than identically sized circular portions
6. Plate size Reduction :: Plate size was one of the most influential factors in minimizing food waste, with a reduction from just 24cm to 21cm resulting in almost a 20% reduction
7. Increase signage and education about plate waste in dining areas
8. Know when and what food is being wasted ::
- The types of foods that are most commonly wasted: bread and cakes
Be more conscious with portions of these
Reduce both the quantity served and the serving size of these items
- Could shift certain items to à la carte cooking near the end of mealtimes to reduce waste without negatively impacting customer experience (like they did last year with late night being served as asked for instead of laying out all the hamburgers and hot dogs etc. before like they do now)
- People tend to waste more food when there are less people in the dining area, so having more of a people-presence during low intensity times could mitigate this
