Restaurant sustainability is not even close to a new concept, but it’s one that becomes more important with each passing day. Our environment is one that is aging dramatically, and the longer we ignore it, the worse it gets. Luckily, sustainability in restaurants is not only entirely possible, but it’s actually pretty simple to get going.
Understanding the Importance of Sustainability in Restaurants
Before we break down how your restaurant can be sustainable, it’s important to talk about why it’s important. Our industry is a unique one, and that means it’ll require a unique approach.
What Makes a Sustainable Restaurant?
Restaurant sustainability practices revolve almost entirely around reuse of organic material. From food scrap to used cooking oil and the trucks that transport them, restaurants have several opportunities to optimize for sustainability.
So, what does a sustainable restaurant look like? A sustainable restaurant minimizes waste through recycling, reuse of organic material, and additionally minimizes carbon emissions through careful ordering. Sustainable restaurants take account of what they use and implement efforts to reduce careless waste. Most importantly, sustainable restaurants care for their ingredients, their employees, and those whom they serve.
Why Should Restaurants be Sustainable?
Restaurant sustainability is crucial to the health of our industry. While this obviously ties into waste and keeping costs manageable, it also relates to the health of your community. Sustainable restaurants help ensure that local food stays local, that our valuable resources aren’t wasted carelessly, and that businesses cause as little harm in the form of carbon emissions as possible.
Ultimately, sustainability in restaurants is a great way to support your local community while reducing your impact on the large issue of food waste in restaurants as a whole.
9 Ways to Incorporate Restaurant Sustainability Practices
Sustainability in restaurants can take many forms. From where and how you source your food, to the things that you do with it, there’s a lot that we can do to cut waste — so let’s dive right in.
Source Locally and Seasonally
You don’t need to be a strictly farm-to-table establishment to source locally and seasonally. In fact, it’s a great practice to get into no matter your type of restaurant; from fast-casual to fine dining, seasonal and local ingredients carry a lot of benefits. One of the top benefits of local ingredients is the impact they have on shipping.
This is because shipping locally requires far less effort from the supply network than it does to ship from a regional warehouse. Farm-to-table means a short drive to and from the farm, cutting out multiple box trucks, planes, and ships.
Beyond carbon emissions, though, local ingredients encourage restaurants to minimize waste — after all, a limited supply means that they need to be more careful with what they have.
Reduce Food Waste Through Smart Inventory Management
On the note of food waste, it doesn’t begin and end with cooking. In fact, it requires a conscious dedication to managing your inventory — and carefully. Restaurant sustainability often lives and dies by the administrative side of the given restaurant, as that’s where guidelines come from.
Your role as a manager or administrator, especially when trying to encourage restaurant sustainability practices, should be one of monitoring and coaching. Pay attention to your waste, the regularity of your ordering, and make adjustments accordingly. Streamline orders to come on fewer trucks, create guidelines for your kitchen to cut waste, and develop a menu that uses ingredients thoughtfully.
In other words, manage your inventory properly, and you’ll find that restaurant sustainability comes quite easily.
Implement a Recycling and Composting Program
Recycling and composting are incredibly easy programs to implement, assuming you have the services in your area to accommodate them.
Another way of repurposing waste is to find local individuals that are willing to take materials to repurpose. The most common instance of this are farmers taking (or even buying) compost from your kitchen waste and your used cooking oil. The cooking oil can be repurposed into biodiesel, and the compost can be used to grow new produce — which you can often trade for, allowing you local, seasonal produce at a minimal cost.
Use Energy-Efficient Appliances and Lighting
Sustainability isn’t just about food waste. In fact, a large part of creating a truly sustainable business involves controlling your daily costs. The things that you don’t generally think about — like electricity, natural gas, water, and the gasoline used to fuel your supply trucks — play a major part in restaurant sustainability.
Every utility and every supply truck creates an impact on your business’s carbon emissions. By taking small steps such as replacing your light bulbs with energy-efficient ones, you’re cutting the amount of energy that you burn through on a daily basis. This, in turn, allows you to minimize your overall usage of non-renewable energy and, ultimately, helps further the goal of restaurant sustainability.
Offer Plant-Based and Sustainable Menu Options
Sustainable menu options are a great way to accomplish multiple things at once. First and foremost, they’re generally made from local produce. This means that you’re able to create tastier food, with fewer carbon emissions, and encourage your guests to eat sustainably.
While your target market may not be entirely (or even mostly) plant-based, you’d be surprised how well plant-based plates can sell when properly marketed. If you opt to take this approach, it’s a great idea to highlight the fact that you’re using local, sustainably-harvested produce. It’s an easy win for you, and allows your guests to feel good about what they’re eating.
Minimize Single-Use Plastics and Use Eco-Friendly Packaging
Even if you primarily operate off of to-go orders, eco-friendly, biodegradable packaging is readily available in most markets. So swap your plastic bar straws for paper or metal, try to use more lids for your line and less plastic wrap, and opt for biodegradable or compostable cups, boxes, and plates. These seemingly small changes can add up and make a big difference in your restaurant’s sustainability.
Install Water-Saving Fixtures
As we mentioned above, your utilities play a large role in how sustainable your business is — and water absolutely counts toward that. Water waste is an incredibly common issue in restaurant sustainability. Our dishwashers burn through dozens of gallons an hour, we regularly run sinks for hours to thaw food, and each chef washes their hands hundreds of times a shift — that adds up.
Using low-flow fixtures on your sinks can be a great start; they minimize the flow of water (without stopping it), allowing your kitchen to operate as normal while still saving water. Beyond that, though, it’s possible that an upgrade to your dishwashing setup could prove wonders for sustainability. Modern machines are designed with improved efficiency in mind (especially when compared to the old-school 3-sink setup), meaning that the act of simply installing and using a newer machine can also help with sustainability in your restaurant.
Train Staff on Sustainability Practices
Training and coaching your staff is crucial to implementing sustainability practices. Your staff are your front line, and that means that they need to be aware of any goals that you set around sustainability. So, talk to your kitchen staff, talk to your front of house, and see what you can do. Chances are that some of your staff has ideas on how to help. Once you’ve established guidelines, it’s time to show your team how to stick to them and lead by example.
Monitor and Report Your Environmental Impact
Finally, it’s important to take note of your progress or lack thereof. Monitor food waste and carbon emissions, regularly return to the numbers surrounding them, and continue to make both long-term goals and short-term objectives.
Ultimately, monitoring your analytics is crucial because it allows you to give your restaurant a regular checkup and, crucially, make needed changes before things get out of hand.
.jpg)
