7 Strategies to Eliminate Office Food Waste
By Beth Rush
Reducing food waste at your office is great for cleaning your break room and the work kitchen, but it can also help people in need and the environment. When somebody throws away those unwanted items from a meal, they often end up in a landfill, contributing to harmful methane emissions. If more people do the same, it generates even more greenhouse gas.
The most suitable way to eliminate food waste at work and help the environment is through strategizing to quickly and seamlessly reduce office waste. Incorporating these ideas could help do so.
1. Highlight the Need to Reduce Food Waste
Hold a special lunch “power hour” to highlight the environmental hazards of wasting food at the office. With everybody gathered, you can highlight this importance and propose steps for improvement. An organized lunch, while enjoying a healthy, catered meal, provides sufficient time to brainstorm ways to approach the problem and get everyone’s buy-in.
Use your lunch meeting, or designate another time, to set SMART — specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and time-bound — goals to reduce food waste. For example, suggest realistic ways to control food inventory management or devise portion control methods to eliminate a percentage of organic waste within a set time frame. Involve kitchen staff and other stakeholders to collaborate effectively to reach your goals.
2. Avoid Buying The Wrong Food
Guessing what everybody in the office enjoys and making a shopping list accordingly is easy. Consider taking a little extra time before doing so by seeking feedback from your co-workers.
Devise a questionnaire offering various food choices they can check off to give you a more accurate idea of how to cater for office lunches. You’ll have a more customized lunch menu with a well-rounded array of food options.
Go further by designing food stations with your checked-off food supplies. This will enable your colleagues to choose the meal ingredients that best suit their dietary requirements and tastes. Shopping according to your coworkers’ feedback will reduce office food waste.
3. Don’t Buy Too Much Food
Buying food that some of your staff do not enjoy encourages unnecessary leftovers, and purchasing more food than people will eat also contributes to food waste. Adopting more customized processes will give a better idea of the quantities of specific foods people eat. Based on any leftovers from meals after this adoption, this knowledge allows you to plan for future food shopping to reduce lunch food waste further.
4. Incorporate Separate Trash Bins
You’ll still end up with some perishable waste even if you adjust and refine your office food-buying habits — coworkers could be absent or not eat their usual lunch amount. Catering to this waste by adding extra bins allows you to distribute it more accurately and reduce landfill methane generation.
Instead of throwing everything into one trash container, your colleagues can throw recyclables into designated separate bins. Together, they keep trash and their leftover food in another bin.
Throwing aluminum cans, plastic and glass bottles, newspapers, paper towels, packaging material, and scrap office paper into relevant recycling containers keeps them away from incinerators and landfills. A perishables bin for food waste does the same, allowing other environmentally friendly disposal options.
5. Compost Your Office Food Waste
One eco-friendly option for food waste is composting. Initiate your company’s membership in a community composting project that returns organic materials to the soil and benefits the environment. Alternatively, sign up with a composting business that collects organic waste in provided bins.
A business contract will likely cost something, but your company will save on landfill costs, build sustainable credibility, and convert food waste into soil and plant-nutritional fertilizer. If your office has an accessible outside space, you could even start a DIY composting area.
6. Contact Caterers and Food Redistributors
Another way to dispose of office lunch leftovers is through a food redistribution service. This service collects excessive waste after large corporate and office lunches and delivers it to community members who need food.
In the U.S., one in seven people lacks reliable access to affordable, nutritious, and culturally appropriate meals. Using a food distributor can help your edible food waste reach the mouths that will value it most.
Many catering companies provide custom meals for office parties, luncheons and similar staff gatherings. Your coworkers must choose their meals from preset menus and mark any dietary preferences.
The caterer can deliver the exact numbers of each before the event, meaning everybody has a meal they want and will likely leave less waste. Whatever leftover food remains afterward, a food redistributor can use it to provide for the less fortunate within the community.
7. Incorporate Technology
Technology assists us in many ways, including controlling food waste. Food waste management software helps large office environments manage food inventory by tracking usage and stock-on-hand, offering actionable insights to streamline existing food waste-saving approaches.
Many mobile apps allow you to enter the purchase dates of specific products and sell-by dates, where applicable. You’ll receive a reminder to use those remaining potatoes, for example, according to the app’s preset period for acceptable use. These reminders help reduce food waste by prompting necessary preparation times for more effective fresh product utilization.
Eliminate Food Waste to Save the Environment and Expense
Incorporating the above strategies can substantially reduce food waste and save on the expense of replacing spoiled items in office pantries and fridges.
By strategizing to decrease leftovers and other food waste at office mealtimes and functions, you can do your part to redirect food waste from producing greenhouse gases in landfills to feeding those in need or creating wholesome fertilizer.
About the author: Beth Rush is the green wellness editor at Body+Mind, where she covers topics like the power of climate consciousness at all stages of education. You can find Beth on Twitter @bodymindmag. Subscribe to Body+Mind for more posts by Beth!
