Find Posts By Topic

New Tools for Food Services & Restaurants to Reduce Food Waste

EPA food waste guideReduce, Reuse, Recycle. And Rethink! The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has a free new resource to reduce food and packaging waste. Because wasted food means wasted money, along with significant environmental and social impacts, the Reducing Wasted Food & Packaging Toolkit helps restaurants, grocers, caterers, and other commercial kitchens reduce food waste.

Understanding the amount, type of, and reason for food waste is the first step toward reducing it. The kit includes an Excel audit tool that allows users to tailor their waste tracking to the level of detail needed for their facility. Once the data is entered, the spreadsheet automatically generates graphs and data summaries to help facilities identify opportunities to reduce waste.

Businesses can also consider joining EPA’s Food Recovery Challenge (FRC) – a free program for any organization which prepares, sells or serves food. Participants reduce wa
sted food through source reduction, donation and recycling, saving money, helping communities and protecting the environment. FRC shares tools, hosts webinars and gives annual EPA awards.