By Katherine Price, Sustainability Editor, H&C News: Cut food costs by cutting food waste.
We all know the staggering statistics around food waste, and when the price of everything is skyrocketing, can we really afford to be throwing away perfectly edible produce?
So many fantastic initiatives sprang up during the pandemic to ensure food was not wasted when hospitality businesses were unexpectedly closed, to help communities access produce close to home, and support industry suppliers. But how much have we learned from that time?
WRAP reports that since 2015, levels of food redistribution have increased over three-fold, suggesting that we are doing better at preventing food being wasted – although the same report added that there remained “significant opportunities” in the hospitality and food service sector.
29 September was International Day of Awareness of Food Loss and Waste, which was launched in 2019 by the United Nations to encourage people to cut food waste for environmental reasons as well as in support of efforts to improve food security and nutrition around the world.
To mark the occasion, food waste distribution platform Too Good To Go and its restaurant partners including Leon and Tortilla highlighted how more than a third of all food goes to waste globally by ‘greying out’ a third of the food imagery on their in-store digital screens.
Chef James Cochran of 12:51 restaurant in London’s Islington, teamed up with Too Good To Go earlier this year for an event where he served unknowing guests a fine dining meal using ingredients that would otherwise have been thrown away. The cost of the ingredients came to a total of £2.69 per person.
“It was quite challenging, as I didn’t know what I was going to be getting”, explains Cochran.
“You can do refined food with ‘food waste’. When certain products get overripe, like mangoes or vegetables, they become sweeter, and you can turn that into a puree and there’s nothing wrong with it at all.
“We’re doing a £40 tasting menu at 12:51 and the price of everything has gone up, from gas and electricity to vegetables and meat, so how can I maintain that price point? It’s just being smart with everything… Most restaurants’ GP sits around 69%-72% – we are consistently hitting 80% GP.”
Whether it’s using cheaper cuts of meat and fish (sometimes also the more sustainable choice) or adding specials to the menu to ensure produce gets used before it’s past its best, Cochran’s been keeping food costs down by cutting down on his food waste.
Fermentation and dehydration techniques are particularly useful for making use of ‘imperfect’ or leftover produce; the kitchen team ferments chilli tops to make a jam, uses leftover beef shin to make beef tartare, and dehydrates pineapple peelings into a powder. One of Cochran’s suppliers gives the restaurant all its overripe tomatoes, which are turned into a tomato tea for Bloody Marys. Oyster shells and mackerel bones are roasted or smoked and used to make dashi, dead herbs are turned into brines, and Cochran also orders in whole animals which he points out is cheaper in the long run as you’re not paying for the butchery.
He highlights the importance of flexibility and seasonality, as well as storing produce properly: “You don’t want to leave your herbs in the fridge because when the fan hits it, it’s going to kill them. Just protect them in damp cloths and keep them in a dark place. Vegetables as well, keep them in water,” he says.
“It’s respecting what you have in front of you. You’ve got to remember that someone’s grown that or slaughtered that or caught that. It’s integral for all chefs to respect the produce.”
Several dining concepts already exist devoted to ‘zero waste dining’ – among them zero waste pioneer Doug McMaster’s Silo in London’s Hackney, which famously doesn’t have a bin. Silo has been going for years, showing that it is possible to run a restaurant with a low-waste philosophy, and that operating in a more sustainable way can also be more cost-effective.
Liam Barker worked in the kitchen at Corrigan’s in London and now runs pop-ups, supper clubs and cookery classes, with a focus on food education (also the name of his YouTube channel), including around food waste. He says reducing waste doesn’t necessarily require expensive technology – he recalls one operator as having simply swapped their black bin bags to clear alternatives so they can see what’s being thrown away, but it can also just be a matter of effective communication across the team.
“The food that comes back to the washing up area is, for me, a sign of what is good and what’s bad as well as the size of the dish – what is coming back on those plates that’s not being eaten? That’s valid information that you can easily get from the pot wash, you don’t necessarily need machines for that,” says Barker.
“They’re going to see all the food that’s going in the bin because they’re standing right next to it. That’s an easy role that someone doing the washing up can play in the business and involve them more in the business as well. Every part of that kitchen team has got a part to play.”