Reducing food waste takes all-in effort

The Shilam Tandoori in Aberystwyth, Wales, is the second restaurant opened by owner Mohammed Somir. He used the ‘Your Business is Food; don’t throw it away’ (YBIF) materials to discover how much food waste his restaurant was producing (Step 1), and by experimenting with different measures he set out to reduce food waste by half in his two restaurants (Step 2).

Using YBIF, the manager and his staff examined the restaurant’s portion sizes in an effort to reduce plate waste. The results revealed high waste at the preparation stage and from customers’ plates. Efforts to tackle this focused initially on staff interaction with customers, to improve customer awareness of portion sizes and to help them avoid over-ordering.

Significant food waste could be considered part and parcel of running a curry house, but the restaurant takes a different approach and was determined to break these perceived patterns. The manager advocated greater customer engagement to improve the overall experience, prevent over-ordering and the subsequent waste of food. He delegated responsibility for achieving these targets to every member of staff following a very detailed analysis of a typical weekend’s food production by his kitchen porter.

Alongside using YBIF resources to reduce waste, the restaurant has trailblazed a 'doggy box' scheme supported by WRAP Cymru whereby customers can take home any leftover food.

Other food-service businesses are encouraged to try the YBIF three-day tracking sheet and calculator to give them insights into how much food they are throwing away and what it costs their business. For even more insights and detail, the seven-day tracking sheet over a month, with YBIF calculator tool helps calculate purchase costs and true waste cost values for each business. Access to the full suite of YBIF resources is available in the source information section.