Tips On How to Minimise Food Waste in Your Catering Business

According to data from the environmental group WRAP in 2023, the UK’s food waste weighs in at an astonishing 10.7 million tonnes per year.

And as remarkable as this statistic is, it doesn’t tell the full story. The total amount of food purchased in the UK is estimated at 42 million tonnes. That means a quarter of the UK’s food is wasted.

For restaurants, pubs, cafes and other catering businesses, food waste doesn’t just represent a significant financial liability – it could also be turning your customers away. With a third of British restaurant goers saying they’re willing to spend more at sustainable venues, excessive food waste could have an impact on your ability to attract and retain a steady flow of diners.

Thankfully, excessive food waste is not something that catering businesses have to accept. Read on below for an in-depth guide on how to minimise your food waste.

The unique waste challenges of the catering industry

Before we explore the key steps to reducing food waste, it’s worth acknowledging the unique set of waste challenges that catering businesses face. These challenges can make it more difficult for you to effectively manage your waste streams and take steps to be more sustainable.
Some of the key issues for catering businesses include:

Perishable inventory. Fresh ingredients often have short shelf lives, making it crucial to manage stock efficiently to avoid spoilage. A lack of effective stock management and demand forecasting can lead to excessive waste and increased costs.
Seasonal fluctuations. Both demand and supply can be unpredictable, with customer numbers rising and falling throughout the year, and seasonal produce may have varying lifespans from month to month. So, while inventory management is vital, it’s also extremely challenging to get right.
Complex waste streams. From extensive packaging to single-use plastics, catering businesses handle a wide variety of complex waste types, making segregation and disposal more challenging.

With such varied factors in play, managing waste efficiently is not just a priority but a necessity for catering businesses. Food waste alone costs the average UK hospitality business £50,000 per year, and other waste issues can push this even higher. The numbers involved are simply too great to ignore.

However, there is reason for optimism. By dedicating time and energy to addressing these unique challenges, catering businesses can reduce waste, cut costs, and operate more sustainably, yet maintaining the quality and consistency their customers expect.

Preparing for mandatory food waste separation

Ensuring your food waste is properly managed isn’t just about improving your business processes – as important as that is. It’s also increasingly important if you want to stay ahead of evolving government regulations.

From March 2025, UK businesses will be expected to arrange for separate food waste collections. The aim of this new regulation is to reduce the amount of food waste that ends up in landfill, and build a clearer sense of just how much food waste is generated by households and businesses.

In order to stay compliant with these new requirements, your business will need to develop a strategy for storing and disposing of your food waste separately. It may be tempting to do the minimum necessary to meet these regulations, but this is a great opportunity to overhaul your approach to food waste.

With that in mind, let’s look at the key steps you can take to minimise the amount of food waste you generate and adopt a more sustainable approach to food waste management.

How to minimise food waste: A step-by-step guide

Step 1: Embrace the waste hierarchy

The first step to minimising your food waste is developing a clear strategy to guide your efforts. Otherwise, you may find yourself putting time and energy into ineffective changes that won’t truly benefit your business.

Thankfully, you don’t need to develop your own food waste management strategy from scratch. The waste hierarchy is a powerful tool for identifying the most effective approaches to waste reduction and has been widely adopted as a guideline for improving sustainability across a range of industries.

The waste hierarchy is a structured framework that orders approaches to waste reduction from most to least impactful. The five levels are:

Prevent. This involves implementing strategies to reduce the amount of waste produced at the source. This can include redesigning products to minimise packaging, promoting sustainable consumption habits, and optimising your business processes to reduce waste generation.
Reuse. This stage focuses on extending the lifespan of resources or materials by using them again for their original or a different purpose. This can involve repairing damaged items, repurposing products, or sharing items among individuals or communities.
Recycle. This involves converting waste back into materials or resources that can then be used to manufacture new products. This is achieved in a variety of ways depending on the specific material, but generally it requires the separation and sorting of recyclable items so that they can be transported to dedicated material recovery facilities (MRFs).
Recover. At this stage, the emphasis is on extracting energy or other valuable resources from waste. This can involve composting food waste, generating energy in Energy from Waste (EfW) plants, or recovering materials from waste for use in manufacturing processes. Recovery helps reduce the need for landfill disposal and can generate renewable energy.
Dispose. The last resort for waste that cannot be prevented, reused, recycled, or recovered. This typically involves landfilling or incineration. Disposal should be minimised as it can have negative environmental impacts, such as pollution and greenhouse gas emissions.

Following the waste hierarchy is an extremely effective way to mitigate your waste challenges. And not just that – it’s also a legal requirement. The Waste (England and Wales) Regulations 2011 specify that businesses must take “reasonable steps” to apply the principles of the waste hierarchy.

So, how can the waste hierarchy be used to minimise your food waste? Let’s look at each level in turn and identify some targeted approaches you can adopt in your catering business.

Step 2: Prevent

For catering businesses, preventing food waste is largely about managing your inventory effectively and limiting the risk that customers will over-order.

Key methods to achieve this include:

Accurate forecasting. Use your historical booking data to identify seasonal and annual trends and predict demand as accurately as possible for the coming months. This will help prevent you from stocking more ingredients than necessary.
Smart menu planning. Try to build your menu around ingredients that have longer shelf lives or can be used across multiple dishes to reduce waste from spoilage.
Portion control. Offer a range of portion sizes and ensure your menu offers a clear indication of how much food your customers will be receiving. This can help limit over-ordering.
First-in, first-out (FIFO). Implement an inventory system where older stock is used before newer stock, ensuring ingredients don’t go to waste.
Partnering with local suppliers. Sourcing your ingredients locally makes it easier to ensure you are getting supplies at their very best, reducing the chances they’ll perish before you have a chance to use them.

By refining your menu, managing your stock effectively and planning ahead, you can substantially limit the food waste your business generates.

Focusing on preventing food waste isn’t just the most powerful and effective way to reduce your costs and limit your environmental impact – it also makes it easier to implement the subsequent steps. With the total amount of waste you generate reduced, steps to reuse and recycle your waste become much more straightforward.

Step 3: Reuse

The principle of the “reuse” stage is that the food waste you do generate does not necessarily need to be discarded. There are many ways that this waste can be put to good use, whether this is on-site or in your local community. These include:

Creative repurposing. Why not try turning leftover ingredients into seasonal specials, soups, or sauces? This can help diversify your menu while reducing food waste at the same time.
Staff meals. Consider using surplus food to prepare meals for staff, reducing waste and saving money on separate food costs.
Food donations. Partner with local charities or food banks to donate edible, unsold food to those in need.

This last point is particularly significant in the current environment. There has been extensive media coverage of the role that food banks play in alleviating poverty across the UK, with 2.3 million people using food banks in 2022/23. This highlights the impact your business can have by supporting these vital efforts.

Step 4: Recycling and recovery

If food waste is unavoidable and there is no way to reuse it, that doesn’t mean it cannot be put to good use. Recycling and recovery processes enable us to turn food waste back into usable materials and resources.

For instance, food waste can be composted, which converts it into fertiliser, or used in anaerobic digestion, which turns it into a source of renewable energy. (Read on below for our in-depth explainer on how anaerobic digestion works.) Used cooking oil can also be collected in dedicated containers and turned into a source of biodiesel.

To maximise your food recycling rates, you should:

Provide training for staff. Make sure your team understands the importance of waste reduction and how to properly sort materials for recycling. Provide clear instructions on what can and can’t be recycled and hold regular refreshers to ensure everyone is on the same page.
Check you have the right bins. Equip your kitchen and prep areas with the appropriate waste bins to make recycling easy and efficient. Place small caddies near prep stations for food scraps and compostable items, and clearly label bins for recycling, compost, and landfill waste. The more convenient the setup, the more likely staff are to follow waste protocols.
Seek support. Partnering with an experienced waste management company can help streamline your recycling and disposal processes. They can offer valuable advice, handle complex waste streams, and ensure you have the support you need to recycle your food waste effectively.

By implementing these strategies, you can be certain that any unavoidable food waste does not end up in landfill. Instead, it is converted back into usable materials or becomes a sustainable source of energy.

By working through these four steps, we’ve outlined above, you should be able to minimise the amount of food waste that ends up at the lowest part of the waste hierarchy – disposal. This represents not only a significant cost saving for your business but also a major reduction in your environmental impact.

How does anaerobic digestion work?

As mentioned above, anaerobic digestion is a vital way to recycle food waste. It is a process that allows food waste to be broken down in an oxygen-free environment, turning it into biogas and a nutrient-rich byproduct called digestate.

This process has become an increasingly prominent source of renewable energy in the UK, with the amount of energy it generates having almost doubled between 2015 and 2020. And with the UK’s total anaerobic digestion capacity now exceeding 500 megawatts, it will be an increasingly significant source of sustainable energy in the coming years.

Here’s a step-by-step breakdown of how it works:

Collection and input. Food waste, such as vegetable scraps, leftovers, and other organic materials, is collected and fed into a sealed, oxygen-free tank called a digester. For catering businesses, this might include everything from kitchen trimmings to uneaten food from customers.
Breakdown by microorganisms. Inside the digester, microorganisms (similar to bacteria in a compost heap) break down the food waste over several days or weeks. The absence of oxygen in the digester is crucial – this is what makes the process “anaerobic.” As the food waste decomposes, it produces two main outputs: biogas and digestate.
Biogas production. Biogas is a mixture of methane and carbon dioxide. This biogas is captured from the digester and can be used as a source of energy. It can be burned to produce electricity and heat or upgraded into biomethane, which is like natural gas and can be used to power vehicles or injected into the gas grid.
Digestate. The solid and liquid material left after digestion is called digestate. This byproduct is rich in nutrients and can be used as a natural fertiliser for agricultural purposes, completing the cycle of resource recovery.
Energy use. The biogas produced by anaerobic digestion can be used in a variety of ways. Some facilities use it to generate electricity and heat that can be used locally or exported to the grid. Alternatively, it can be purified into biomethane, a cleaner fuel that can replace fossil fuels in transportation or heating.

For catering businesses, anaerobic digestion is an essential way to minimise the amount of food waste that ends up in landfill. By converting food that cannot be reused on-site into a source of energy, this process helps to ensure your food waste is put to work powering homes across the UK.

How a waste management company can help you minimise food waste

Implementing the steps we’ve outlined above is not a simple process. And while some of these steps you will be able to tackle yourself, others will require external support.

To ensure your food waste is recycled effectively, you’ll need to work with a waste management company that understands the needs of your business and offers tailored support. A waste management company can provide you with:

Waste audit. If your restaurant or catering business has complex waste needs, you will likely benefit from working with a waste management company that provides in-depth waste audits. This will ensure that you are getting a fully bespoke service that has the biggest possible benefit for your waste processes.
Dedicated bins. A waste management company can provide you with the dedicated food waste bins you need to maximise your recycling efforts. The number and size of bins can be matched to the size of your premises and the quantity of waste you generate.
Tailored collection schedule. By working with a waste management company, you can ensure you get waste collections that meet your needs. These collections can be scheduled to minimise any disruption to your business – including avoiding clashes with any weekly or daily food deliveries – and come at a frequency that matches the quantity of waste you produce.
Partnerships with local facilities. Established waste management businesses will likely have developed partnerships with material recovery facilities (MRFs) and anaerobic digestion plants in the local region. This enables them to ensure that as much of your food waste as possible is diverted from landfill.

By offering these significant benefits, a waste management company can transform the way your catering business approaches food waste.

Of course, to see the best possible results, you’ll need to choose a waste management company that truly understands the hospitality industry and has proven experience tackling food waste. And that’s why Yorwaste should be your top choice.

Yorwaste can help you minimise food waste

While minimising food waste can reap significant benefits for catering businesses, it’s not a simple task. A clear and focused waste management strategy can help, of course – and hopefully, our guide has given you some useful suggestions on how to get started.

But to see a significant reduction in your food waste – and ensure the waste you do produce is dealt with in a sustainable way – you need the support of a waste management company. They’ll be able to help you reduce your costs while boosting your eco-friendly credentials.

Here at Yorwaste, we’ve helped restaurants, pubs, events companies and other catering businesses across North Yorkshire to successfully manage their food waste. With a dedicated fleet of vehicles and an established partnership with a local anaerobic digestion plant, you can be confident your food waste is being disposed of in an efficient and environmentally friendly way.

To learn more about how we can help or to arrange an initial consultation, get in touch today and speak to one of our waste management experts.