ประโยชน์จากการจัดการ Food Waste ในร้านอาหาร

Sep 28, 2020
It can’t be denied that restaurant businesses create a large quantity of food waste each year. According to the Waste and Resource Action Programme, 45% of food waste is generated during the cooking process, 21% comes from food spoilage before being consumed by customers, and only 34% is consumers’ leftover food.

However, many restaurant owners don’t realize the importance of food waste management as they believe that the waste cannot be used to serve customers, for instance, trimmed, spoiled, or fallen ingredients during the cooking process. Instead, they tend to forget that such waste also has costs,which means the less waste, the more profits.

To make it clearer, if you see a one-bath coin fallen on the kitchen floor, will you pick it up or just walk past ? Absolutely, everybody will pick it up since it has some value although just one baht. Then when they are in the form of raw materials like spoiled meat, vegetables, or rice fallen on the floor or kept in the fridge, why don’t you see the value of them like when they are in cash?

In the period when it is hard to increase sales, efficient inventory management  to minimize waste is not just an option, but it’s what restaurants need to focus and place great importance on.

Generally, a restaurant’s net profit is around 10%-15%. If you can sell one hundred thousand baht, you will get around ten thousand to fifteen thousand baht of profits. However, if you can save ten thousand baht for the cost, it also means you will gain 10,000 baht profit. In other words, it takes almost 10 times more effort to increase sales than to save costs. Surprisingly, this issue does not receive much attention from restaurant owners, most of whom tend to keep focusing on advertising and promotions. The benefits restaurants will gain from food waste management can be summarized as follows:

1. Enhancing restaurant hygiene

Restaurants with raw material management tend to be cleaner and more organized than restaurants without one as they have a systematic work plan and always carry out stock counting, use trimmed raw materials to cook other dishes, or prevent raw materials from turning bad as a result of overcrowdedness. This also helps reduce accumulation of dirtiness, which can attract dirty animals.

2. Promoting good images for the restaurant

If you can manage your raw materials to the extent of zero waste, you can use this as a selling point for your restaurant apart from the abovementioned benefits. In addition to the taste of food, today consumers pay more attention to social involvement. Therefore, they would certainly prefer visiting restaurants with public mind to those wasting raw materials.



Bo.lan Restaurant has a food waste management system to prevent leftover foods, which are mostly food scraps and various kinds of raw materials, using the Upcycled Food Waste Concept. The interview can be accessed via YouTube or Facebook : Bo.lan 

3. Saving costs for the restaurant

Certainly, in order to reduce food waste, you need to start from planning  the raw material ordering process to meet the demands. The more efficient your raw material management plan, the more cost of goods sold you can save as you can reduce the opportunities of oversupply, causing waste. In addition, labour cost can be minimized as the kitchen staff don’t need to waste their time on preparing oversupplied raw materials.

4. Increasing restaurant profits



Apart from saving the cost of raw materials, good raw material planning allows you to use trimmed raw materials or leftover food, such as vegetables or fruits with non-decent figure, or pork scraps from the slicer for cooking a new dish. As can be seen from the picture, pork scraps are used to cook Bolognese sauce to eat with spaghetti or to cook hamburg, a delicious Japanese-style hamburger. This can also reduce food waste and increase the opportunities for the restaurant to gain more profits.

5. Reducing management obligations



Raw material management planning enables kitchen staff to work more conveniently, without supplies all over the place to obstruct their work. When you arrange your refrigerator systematically by having fixed spaces for different raw materials, you won’t have to find where your raw materials are, and this reduces the chance of lower raw material quality caused by overcrowdedness.

Finally, to maximize the efficiency of food waste management, it is not just the duty of the kitchen staff, but it requires cooperation from all the restaurant staff and the owner. More importantly, it’s not just a one-time operation, but consistent planning and control needs to be carried out for the highest benefits of your restaurant and customers.

You can tune in Zero Food Waste Program to Reduce Costs and Increase Profits through Food Waste Reduction  via Facebook : Makro Horeca Academy and the website to increase restaurant owners’ know-how so that they can develop their business to survive the current crisis and to educate them on how to reduce food waste for reducing costs and increasing profits, with the online content on food waste and food waste management  methods.

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