Find hidden profits in your food waste in 2023

​A single restaurant can produce approximately 25,000-75,000 pounds of food waste each year – or for perspective, nearly the maximum weight capacity of a semi truck. That waste eats into your profits – and while restaurants have been adopting more tools to minimize waste, as well as forging more partnerships to find uses for excess food, most restaurants still have room to improve their waste monitoring and management. That’s particularly true as restaurants stretch to operate with smaller staffs at the moment. Tracking waste can easily slip in the midst of a busy Friday night dinner shift. But consider it one of the key steps you take to get a handle on your costs in 2023 – and even small steps can help you make progress. Tony Smith, cofounder and CEO of Restaurant365, advises restaurants use a food waste log to quickly record food waste when it happens – the who, what, how and why – and then analyzing it later. It can be a digital document or even just a spreadsheet hanging in the kitchen. The log can provide a starting point you can use to track patterns in waste that then dictate changes you need to make to operational tasks as varied as planning your menu, determining serving sizes (and if you need to adjust sizes or upcycle an item in an effort to upsell it) training your team, or adjusting food orders. From there, comparing your theoretical and actual food costs on a regular basis and focusing first on the areas where they are farthest apart can help you minimize your biggest pain points when it comes to food waste.

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