challenge:
Reduce Food Cost / Waste
A large suburban / conference hotel provided a daily “free” breakfast buffet included in the hotel’s room rate. Overall costs were high. Hotel management had been working to reduce its waste with the support of local and regional organizations.
GVI teemed with a corporate sustainability strategist to join a project led by World Wildlife Fund: create and deliver a compelling workshop based upon the principles of the American Hotel & Lodging Association’s newly-developed food waste web site: hotelkitchen.org.
THE WORKSHOP
In June of 2018 hotel management attended the workshop, “How to Reduce Food Waste in Hotels”.
The interactive workshop’s content applied to most segments of foodservice, and attendee backgrounds include restaurants, hotels, meal delivery, university dining, bars, breweries, non-commercial feeding, casinos, senior living and more.
Hotel management left the workshop with an aggressive goal, “To reduce breakfast food waste by 20%”.
results:
ONE YEAR LATER
This case study compared data in April and May of 2018, the period preceding the workshop, to the same two months in 2019.
A year later, the hotel’s 20 Yard compactor’s waste disposal quantities are down significantly, 47%, more than 13 tons, vs. April and May of 2018.
Among changes made since the initiatives mentioned above is a change in specifications for some food items. A standout example is link sausage. In 2018 the hotel purchased a one-ounce sausage link. In 2019 they switched to a high-quality but smaller half-ounce link. They also added a 1.5-ounce sausage patty. Even with a second sausage offering, all sausage consumption declined by 38%. This trend equates to a two-ton reduction of sausage purchases per year.
Further steps resulted in a decline of pasteurized egg purchases by 7.4% during the period measured. This trend equates to more than one ton of eggs waste prevention per year.