Food waste is the cause of an estimated 10% of greenhouse gas emissions globally. Thankfully, reducing surplus food can be easy for small businesses.How to: reduce your business' surplus food

In the commercial sector in Ireland, 303,000 tonnes of food is wasted per year. That’s nearly six times the weight of the Titanic. At Too Good To Go, we believe in a world without food waste. By working with food businesses of all sizes and sectors, we have helped to save 95.7 million Surprise Bags of surplus food globally.

WHY FOOD WASTE MATTERS

It’s estimated that food waste is the cause of about 10% of greenhouse gas emissions globally.

This means that the surplus food that small businesses are wasting comes not only at a financial cost but at a cost to our environment as well.

Thankfully, reducing surplus food can be easy for small businesses - it can be as simple as planning ahead!

TRACK YOUR SURPLUS FOOD AS A SMALL BUSINESS

By segmenting and weighing your waste bins, you can get an idea of how much surplus food your small business creates day by day, week on week. You can begin by tracking:

• From-plate waste
• Expired/unusable material waste
• Cuttings/spillage waste
• Returned orders
• Uneaten food/meals

By subtracting these weights from raw material weights, you get an idea of how much food you are wasting, allowing you to adjust to save money and shrink your environmental footprint.

If you’re seeing a lot of from-plate waste, it may be time for you to think about portion sizing. If your ingredients are expiring before you use them, you can adjust your menu to make the most of these ingredients, or reduce your order amount.

ADJUSTING YOUR MENU

If you’re seeing a lot of food waste throughout your processes, fine-tuning your menu could spell much less food waste.

Do you have soup on your menu? It can be the perfect home for potato skins, broccoli stalks, carrot shreds... The pieces we usually scrape into the bin but are as nutritious and delicious as the fruit or vegetable that they’ve come from.

It’s worthwhile to think of how you can duplicate ingredients across your menu. By consolidating your supply, you can reduce the likelihood of having surplus food that’s unusable.

Bringing some anti-waste strategy to your offering can help to make your systems much more sustainable.

REDISTRIBUTE SURPLUS FOOD

When you do have extra food at the end of the day - whether this is raw ingredients, the morning’s scones, hot food from your deli well or anything in between - prioritise finding a home for it.

There are options galore: you can allow staff to bring it home to give it a new lease of life, you can team up with a food waste reduction app like Too Good To Go, and some food can be donated to food inequality organisations.

HELP YOUR TEAM TO UNDERSTAND THE WHY

Encouraging an efficient team to add a new process to their already busy schedule can be difficult, to say the least. Providing educational training on the scale of the food waste problem may help them to connect with the issue, empowering them to prioritise food waste reduction in the business.

Finally, it’s important to not beat yourself up while you get into the swing of saving more food. It can take time to find out what will work best for you, so be patient, track progress and celebrate success!