Out of sight, out of mind. The modern world is built on it. Chuck it in the bin, bury it in landfill. Do the virtuous thing and recycle it and it’ll probably end up shipped to Asia instead. Anything we can do to avoid acknowledging that we do really need to change. And quickly.
Easily the least glamorous part of running a restaurant is waste. Because holy hell there’s a lot of it. But well thought out practices surrounding waste are one of the most important, and hardest to get right, aspects of our Perfect Restaurant.
Did you know that restaurants and food business’s account for 10% of all the food waste generated in the UK? That’s around a million tonnes per year and is estimated to cost 97p per plate of food. So, there are obvious financial benefits to this one. Given how tight the margins are in hospitality these days, an extra 97p per dish would be welcome I imagine!
There are several ways we can limit our waste but the restaurants that have done it really well, like Silo in London or Nolla in Finland have been built with zero waste in mind and this it obviously the easiest way to do it. Building your restaurant with these systems already in place undoubtedly makes it easier to achieve rather than trying to retrofit a building to suit changed needs.
Not many of us get to build a restaurant from scratch though so let’s look at some ways that we could reduce our waste from the existing structures and constraints of our existing workplaces.
Obviously, food waste has the most scope to make a difference in a kitchen. At The Ethicurean, using as much as we could of any ingredient was written into the DNA of the restaurant from day one. We would ferment the tops of alliums and the dehydrate them into powders, make oils from herb stems, pickle gluts of vegetables and make krauts and kimchi from cauliflower stems and leaves. We encouraged our staff to think of new ways to use up everything that came into the kitchen and then find ways of incorporating them into dishes. We were lucky enough to be able to see the gardeners growing the veg and were driven on by a desire not to let their hard work go to waste.
It was also great for business, meaning that we were mostly able to work to a GP of over 80% whilst keeping our dishes interesting.
Even so there were always dishes on the a la carte that wouldn’t sell as well as hoped and so when we relaunched after Covid we switched to a single tasting menu and no walk-ins, meaning that we knew the exact number of guests for the week and how much to order. Now, whilst I appreciate that this isn’t an option for a lot of restaurants, I do believe it made a huge difference to the amount of stock we were carrying and the amount of waste at the end of the day. If fixed menus aren’t an option, Nolla uses food tracking software alongside its menu to see what sells and what doesn’t, allowing changes and tweaks to be made before food has gone off.
Key to the transition to a more circular approach to running a restaurant is supplier engagement. It’s important to get suppliers to connect with the process as most single use packaging enters the restaurant this way. Encouraging producers to bring items in reusable crates or tubs rather than vac-packed can make a huge difference, especially if they are interested in finding new, more sustainable packaging methods anyway. One of the big changes we were able to make was having our dairy delivered in metal churns rather than plastic bottles. The churns cost about £80 each but it was offset by the milk being slightly cheaper and over the course of the 2 years we saved thousands of plastic milk jugs going in the bin.
Other suppliers we had less luck with, and we found that the dry store company was unwilling to risk spoilage by not having ingredients in plastic. Being such a small part of their change, we were unable to persuade them otherwise, but this change will come and the more restaurants that insist on it the sooner that will be.
To achieve what we need to achieve for the perfect restaurant we’re going to need to be innovative and surround ourselves with others who are passionate and innovative too. Finding crafts people who can take the waste that we do accumulate and turn it into beautiful, practical items will help up to get round and supply chain issues that arise. People like Clement Knives, who takes waste metal and nos canisters and turns them all into kitchen knives or Potters Thumbs, a London based potter who is turning waste glass into plates for Silo.
Like many things in life, the right option isn’t always going to be the most straightforward one but, like solving any difficult puzzle, it will almost certainly be the more rewarding one.
Engineering the waste out of such an inherently wasteful industry is going to be hard. There are countless barriers to overcome and loads of red tape to go with it. To succeed, the Perfect Restaurant will need to be staffed and surrounded by clever, forward-thinking people who share the same goals. Only then will we stand a chance of truly making a difference.
