Everyone in hospitality is familiar with food waste, whether it’s produced by customers or spoiled, expired stock sitting unused in the stock room. According to the World Wildlife Fund, 40% of total food waste occurs in customer-facing businesses, like supermarkets, hotels and restaurants. Research from Feedback reported that even with a 1% reduction in food waste, food businesses could save an estimated £24.4m a year.
The good news is that it’s an area where more efficient processes can have a big impact. Our founder here at growyze, Kati Hristova, is someone who has helped steer hospitality businesses through difficult times over 20 years.
Not only did Kati realise that many of the manual, headache-inducing challenges the industry faces could be solved by having the right tools in place (hello growyze!) but that this would also lead to better loss prevention.
growyze helps hospitality businesses find and fix profit leaks, emerging from areas like wasted food, restaurant dishes which aren’t sustainable, and missing items.
In this guide, we’ll show you how you can use growyze to reduce your weekly, monthly and annual food waste while minimising loss and maximising earnings.
growyze’s inventory management solution: how to reduce food waste in your business
growyze has all the features and capabilities you need to identify, reduce and manage food waste in your establishment. Here are three practical areas you can use to reduce food waste in your restaurant:
1. Log, capture and reduce waste more effectively
- growyze lets you create an accurate log of waste. Not only can you ensure all waste is logged (no more “missing” products) but you can also generate waste reports. Helping to document all items wasted during that period to better understand where and why waste is happening.
- Identify where stock discrepancies are occurring - with growyze you keep track of all stock that’s delivered, used, sold and wasted. growyze’s stock discrepancy reports allow you to identify discrepancies between the stock you opened and closed with, against current inventory levels. Having a complete overview allows you to easily spot where stock is missing or unaccounted for in between stocktakes to pinpoint why, and take steps to prevent it.
2. Analyse menu items, to improve profitability and decrease wasted items
- Menu analysis allows you to see which menu items are profitable, and which are costing you money. This can help with loss prevention as if certain items are being wasted or unsold, and they’re your less profitable menu items it can help you reengineer your menu for better profitability, and less waste.
- It also allows you to analyse which ingredients are being used where, helping you to engineer your food menus to reduce waste. For example, if lettuce is only being used in one dish meaning that 60% of the bag is being wasted, this may need an adjustment.
3. Optimise your supply chain for fewer deliveries and more efficient ordering
- You can manage all of your supplier relationships on growyze’s platform and select suppliers based on cost, location and sustainability. growyze also lets you set minimum order values that prevent you from ordering below a set amount, reducing your total number of deliveries therefore lowering your carbon footprint.
- With growyze you can also determine ordering protocol, such as whether staff can order beverage items by case, bottle or both. This helps ensure you’re only ordering what you need, and not wasting quantities because you’ve ordered a case rather than a bottle.
- When you order stock with growyze you can also set automated order reminders to prevent reactive purchasing and ensure you’re ordering before any cut-off deadlines.
- Lastly, growyze gives you a digital trail of all stock bought from suppliers and sold to customers in a single location. This centralises your data and prevents visibility gaps from forming between an item’s cost and how much you sold it for. It also creates a collection of historical data you can use to identify recurring trends and patterns in items that are being wasted that you can work to eliminate.
Make waste management a breeze with growyze
At growyze, our mission is to help prevent food waste and reduce losses across your business by giving you better visibility and monitoring across every area.
Book a demo to discover how we can simplify and streamline your waste management for greater efficiency.
