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The Clever Way Restaurants Use The Menu To Avoid Food Waste

Column: industry Tag: food,restaurant Published: 2024-12-06 09:47 Source: www.mashed.com Author: STACIE ADAMSDEC. 5

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Food waste is a major problem in restaurants. Estimates show that billions of pounds of food are discarded every year in American restaurants (via Move For Hunger), which has a negative impact on businesses as well as the environment. While some establishments use off-beat methods to combat food waste, such as the restaurant that served its diners literal garbage, others rely on more conventional, discreet methods. Restaurants can smartly repurpose unused ingredients to create all new dishes for their menus, which keeps them from throwing away perfectly good food that hasn't yet made its way to customers. For instance, chefs can take something like stale bread and easily turn it into croutons to be served with salad.

Over on Reddit, a discussion about how dining establishments manage surplus food provided even more examples. Leftover dinner ingredients can be incorporated into a soup to be served during lunch or as an appetizer or side, while one commenter claimed, "In pastry a lot of things can be turned into ice cream." When it comes to leftover proteins, a former buffet manager stated, "A lot of the meat was repurposed for other items (meatloaf got crumbled for spaghetti sauce, fried chicken got shredded for salad bar/chicken salad)." Provided that leftover food is still fresh, there's no good reason why it shouldn't be used in new menu items.

Wasting food has a number of negative effects

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When it comes to food waste in restaurants, an estimated 4% to 10% of purchased items fail to make their way to diners, and of the food that customers do receive, anywhere from 31% to 40% is left uneaten (via The Restaurant HQ). Food waste is a major contributor to climate change, as food that ends up in landfills is often buried, and the lack of oxygen in these conditions means the food produces methane as it decomposes. Methane is a particularly harmful gas where climate change is concerned, as its warming effect is more than 80 times higher than the effects of carbon dioxide when comparing the two gases during the first 20 years after they enter the atmosphere.

The environmental effects of food waste should be compelling enough to address the problem, but restaurants have a more personal reason to change their wasteful ways. All over the world, food waste contributes to massive losses estimated to reach $2.6 trillion annually, according to a 2021 study published in Foods. Additionally, chefs are invested in repurposing food due to rising food prices, which can be attributed to factors like bird flu, the war in Ukraine, and pandemic aftereffects. Along with repurposing ingredients to create new menu items, some restaurants are using smaller portion sizes to reduce their food waste, as well as to combat the ravages of inflation. Repurposing ingredients in this way benefits everyone, as it ensures your favorite dining establishments remain in business while doing what's right for the environment.

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