Eat Ethically How much food do restaurants waste?

Date Published:

21/10/2009

What does McDonalds do with its leftovers and how much food gets wasted at a Gordon Ramsay restaurant? Charlie Cottrell finds what's really going into the bins at our favourite eateries

Henry Dimbleby is the founder of healthy fast food chain, LEON, serving 50,000 people per week across 9 restaurants.

How big an issue is food waste to LEON?

Henry: It's a big issue for all restaurants. At LEON, food waste runs to about 3 per cent of our revenue in terms of cost. That's low for a fast food restaurant.

What sort of waste does LEON produce?

Henry: There are two kinds of food waste; food that hasn't been served but is still edible and kitchen waste. We are in a trial to get our kitchen waste picked up and composted.

How much is leftover uneaten food from customers?

Henry: It's hard to calculate because at the moment food waste and packaging goes in the same bin. We are trying to get all of our packaging to be compostable and get that picked up with the food waste. At the moment the only compostable plastics are made of corn starch and I believe it is bad news to be making plastic from food-stuffs when the biggest issue on the planet is food security with a massively growing population.

Do you ever donate or give away food that would otherwise go to waste?

Henry: I want to. At the moment the issue is health and safety because the food is warm. We are trying to find a charity that will take it so, if anyone has an idea I'd be delighted to hear it. It seems a bit of a pointless task to take the food out of the ground, wash it, cook it and put it back in the ground.

Do there need to be industry-led directives to deal with food waste?

Henry: Absolutely. I'm working to set up the Sustainable Restaurant Association - it's the brainchild of Marcus Ainsbury, and I'm one of the first restaurants on board. We're working out what are the most important issues with sustainability and the best ways of addressing them especially for restaurants with less resources than a chain. The aim is to make the UK restaurant industry the most sustainable in the world.

Nicki Fisher is sustainability manager for Pret a Manger, who serve 1.6 million sandwiches, cakes and snacks per week.

How much food waste does Pret generate?

Nicki: About 2-3 per cent of potential sales is food waste - it's very low. In the kitchen there's waste such as coffee grinds and fresh food like tomato ends and bread ends. We are about to launch composting across all the estate to stop food going to landfill.

How much of an issue is food waste to Pret a Manger?

Nicki: Donating food to stop it going to waste is fundamental to Pret culture. Ever since Pret was founded, in 1986, we have given our leftover food to the homeless. It makes perfect sense. The owners believed there was no point spending time, energy and money making quality food just to throw it away.

What procedures do you have in place to deal with food waste?

Nicki: In the last four years we've got more organised getting food to homes. We set up the Pret Charity Run to collect and redistribute food to homeless and drop-in centres in London; for the rest of the shops, there is a person in Head Office whose sole job it is to link up homeless charities to our shops. 98 per cent of our shops donate 1.7 million food products per year.

Have you ever had any problems with donating food?

Nicki: Never. Not once in 20 years. We have a contract with the charities to say the food has to be eaten by 2pm the following day to make sure it's safe and it is up to them to refrigerate the food. We've given fridges to charities who didn't have their own.

What changes could the industry make to deal with food waste?

Nicki: There could definitely be more government-led directives, to help smaller restaurants who don't have the £200,000 to invest in food donation programmes. We are in a unique position but if businesses are prepared to put time energy and money into it the problem of food waste is not insurmountable.

Katie Saunders is environment manager for McDonald’s UK who serve 14 million customers per week across 1,200 restaurants.

What sort of waste does McDonalds produce?

Katie: We have a carefully monitored food supply chain to make sure our kitchen waste is very low, about 3 per cent. Roughly 17 per cent of our total 'front of house' waste (what the customer throws away) is food waste.

What procedures do you have in place to deal with food waste?

Katie: There is a company-wide environmental policy and commitment to zero waste. All our used cooking oil is collected and recycled into bio-oil which powers our delivery fleet.

Since 2007, we have been running a programme in Sheffield where 11 restaurants are diverting all their waste to an Energy for Waste recovery programme. The waste is incinerated and the energy created is fed back to the electricity grid. We had this audited by the Carbon Trust who told us it reduced our carbon emissions by 54 per cent.

Will this be rolled out across the UK?

Katie: We are looking to roll it out but at the moment it is difficult to find a national infrastructure for waste recovery systems, so you would have to truck waste to the available facilities. We don't want to reduce landfill at the cost of increasing our carbon footprint.

Can you make sure franchise holders support these procedures?

Katie: Franchises are environmentally motivated but also profit motivated and it is in their interest to reduce waste as much as possible. In terms of biodiesel it has been embraced by franchisees system-wide.

Do you ever donate or give away food that would otherwise go to waste?

Katie: We don't and there are two reasons. The amount of food wasted in the kitchen is too low and you can't give away half eaten burgers that customers leave. Also there is health and safety. The food waste we have is cooked product which would no longer be fresh.

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