11
Winter 2014 Issue
S U S T A I
N A B I
L I
T Y
When industry consultant Jim Laube
managed steakhouses in the 1980s, he
taught his employees to view food on
the shelves not as edible products, but
as piles of cash.
“In essence that’s all it was because
we’d traded cash for that food, and then
we had to trade that food to customers
for cash,” said Laube, founder of
RestaurantOwner.com and a restaurant
industry trainer. “But to make my point
really hit home, I trained them to see
wasted food as money thrown in the
trash. If it’s a steak that’s overcooked
and a guest sends it back, that was a
$10 bill gone. If it’s a handful of cheese
dropped onto a dirty floor, that’s 50
cents, and that adds up.”
Sadly, lost cash tied to wasted food
is only part of the overall problem.
The investment of energy, labor and
water into the production, storage and
transport of raw foods is wasted if
those ingredients are never converted
to actual meals on customers’ plates.
According to the Food Waste Reduction
Alliance, it takes the same amount of
water to produce a single hamburger
as it does to take a 90-minute shower.
Therefore, one wasted hamburger means
all the resources required to produce
those ingredients are also wasted—a
remarkable environmental impact.
The National Restaurant Association
(NRA) delivers more profound figures:
80 billion pounds of food ends up in
America’s landfills each year, and
discarded food makes up the largest
portion of that. That’s an astonishing
242 pounds per American each year
or about 10 ounces each day. And
in a nation home to an abundant
food supply and more than 800,000
restaurants, that’s especially troubling
when untold populations go to bed each
day malnourished.
The U.S. restaurant industry’s share of
that waste is a massive 37 percent (29.6
billion pounds), and it’s estimated that
half of most restaurant’s total waste
output is food. Reducing those losses
is no mean feat, even when applying
Laube’s object lesson of cash on the
shelves. Whether waste results from
inventory mismanagement, ineffective
portion controls or improperly cooked
food, staffs are wasting valuable
resources and costing restaurateurs
millions in lost profits.
“When you think about it like that, you
start to see how it’s wrong on every level
to waste food,” Laube said. “And I work
with clients who really want to stop
Reduce Food Waste
to Boost Profits, Benefit
the Environment
