By Indiana Lee, Contributor
The success of your restaurant is influenced by a variety of factors. One of these is your attitude to waste. When your staff treats food and other resources inefficiently, it can genuinely impact your ability to continue operating.
It’s no wonder, then, that more restaurants are training their staff in zero-waste methods. This is the process of engaging all employees to take steps that prevent wastage in all their activities. This isn’t always easy, particularly in the fast-paced restaurant environment. Nevertheless, your commitment to passing on these skills is increasingly essential.
Let’s explore why zero-waste training is essential and how you can best approach it.
The Imperatives of Zero-Waste Training
Training takes a significant amount of time, commitment, and even capital investment. Therefore, it’s worth getting a good understanding of why dedicating these to teaching your staff about zero-waste practices can produce tangible outcomes.
Some of the benefits include:
It maximizes your ingredient investment: Every ingredient your restaurant uses costs money. This means that every wasted portion of ingredients impacts your profit margins. Yes, an inch of a carrot here or a slither of ham there may equate to a few cents each. But this adds up over the course of the days, weeks, and months. The long-term outcomes of training your staff to minimize wastage could more than offset your investment.
It affects the environment: Wastage — whether it’s food, utilities, or other resources — negatively affects the planet. Not using ingredients to their fullest may mean you’re over-ordering, which puts greater pressure on local agriculture. It also increases the use of fuel and release of emissions during product transport. Investment in training your staff in zero-waste can boost sustainability. Not to mention it can be a useful point of marketing to consumers that are increasingly environmentally conscious.
It’s also important to think carefully about what the more individualized imperatives are for your restaurant. Perhaps you want to show your staff that you want to invest in giving them useful skills, which may impact retention. Maybe you want your kitchen staff to be more creative with usually wasted parts of ingredients, which might influence your restaurant’s unique selling proposition (USP). Having a good handle on these can motivate and direct your actions.
Teach Practical Strategies
Clarity is essential when training your staff in zero-waste practices. The more practical you can make the strategies, the more effectively they’re likely to implement them into their day-to-day routines.
Some of the practical strategies to zero-waste you could incorporate into training include:
Shelf life management: One of the common causes of waste in restaurants is allowing food to go past its use-by date. Train your staff on product shelf life management practices that reduce the amount of food you have to throw out. This could include teaching kitchen staff about first-in, first-out logic that ensures the oldest inventory is at the front of storage, so it’s used sooner. Teach managers how to use historical data to more accurately forecast demand for products so they can order more realistic amounts of food.
Portion control: Plates filled to the brim with food can give a sense of luxury. However, when consumers don’t eat it all, the result is waste. Train kitchen staff to use portion scales when plating food to offer more realistic meal sizes. Wait staff should also be trained to give accurate answers when guests ask questions about the portion size.
Waste audits: Train your staff on how to conduct effective waste audits. This may include routines for weighing bags of food waste at the end of each day before taking them out to the trash. It might involve encouraging bussing, waiting, and kitchen staff to contribute to a waste log that tracks everything from spills to misfires. Guide managers through using this data to analyze practices and make improvements.
Some forms of zero-waste strategy will be more relevant than others, depending on the functions of your restaurant. It can be wise to review where your restaurant is particularly experiencing waste. This enables you to better prioritize different types of strategy training to meet your needs.
Regularly Review Processes
Training on zero waste management isn’t a one-and-done activity. Certainly, your staff will need regular refreshers. However, you’ll also need to make certain that your approach to waste management is still effective. This helps you ensure your training continues to be relevant.
This is where a commitment to regular process improvement can benefit your company. This enables you to better streamline your practices, see what is and isn’t working well, and identify additional areas of waste so you can allocate your resources more effectively. Take the time to fully map out your processes with flow charts. You can then analyze these to find unnecessary repetition or areas that are being neglected.
It’s also vital to involve your staff in both analyzing and redesigning your waste management processes. They’ll have more direct insights into day-to-day operations. This isn’t just a way to help your restaurant be more profitable and competitive. It can also improve employee satisfaction, as they’ll feel more meaningfully connected to the restaurant’s success. You may even find they suggest more innovative uses for food waste that you wouldn’t otherwise have considered.
Indeed, these process improvements shouldn’t just apply to zero-waste itself. Take the same approach to improving your training. There will always be ways you can make learning more effective and engaging. By reviewing and adjusting you may be able to improve your workers’ grasp and adoption of your processes.
Conclusion
Zero-waste training empowers your staff to contribute to more responsible and profitable restaurant operations. Don’t forget to make this as simple to adopt as possible and keep making meaningful improvements.
Alongside these training routines, you should also consider making zero-waste a metric for your employee rewards program. This not only shows you appreciate their efforts, but also encourages everyone to engage in ways that have positive outcomes for your business, your staff, and the planet.
