How to reduce food waste in your restaurant

Stand next to the kitchen bin at the end of a busy night and you'll see money: trimmed fat, a tray of rice nobody ordered, half-eaten portions of fries, a crate of tomatoes that turned while everyone was busy. Most restaurants never put a number on it, which is why it never gets fixed.

This guide is a working plan, not a list of good intentions. Log what you throw away for two weeks and put a price on it, forecast prep from your own sales, cut the ingredients that only one dish uses, fix portions, and use your menu to sell stock before it spoils. The EGP figures are illustrations; the method works on any kitchen.

1The four kinds of kitchen waste

Waste is not one problem. Each kind has a different cause and a different fix, so sort it before you try to reduce it.

Type	What it looks like	Usual cause	First fix
Spoilage	Produce, dairy or meat past its date	Over-ordering, poor rotation, fridge temperature	Par levels, date labels, first in, first out
Prep and trim	Peel, bones, fat, ends	Poor yield, untrained knife work, wrong cut bought	Measure yield, reuse trim in stocks and staff meals
Overproduction	Cooked food left at close	Prepping by habit, not by forecast	Forecast by weekday, cook in smaller batches
Plate waste	Food coming back on plates	Portions too big, side dishes nobody wants	Adjust portions, make sides optional

A fifth, smaller category is errors: wrong orders, burnt dishes, remakes. Log them too, because they point to problems at the pass or in how orders reach the kitchen.

2Step 1: measure it for two weeks

You can't manage what nobody writes down. Put a clipboard and a scale next to each waste point (prep, line, dish return) and log every item for two normal weeks.

• Date and station
• Item (be specific: "cooked basmati rice", not "rice")
• Weight or count
• Reason: spoiled, trim, overproduced, returned, error
• Initials of whoever logged it

At the end of each week, multiply quantities by ingredient cost. An illustrative week might look like this:

Reason	Weekly cost (EGP)
Spoilage	2,100
Prep and trim (beyond normal yield)	900
Overproduction	2,600
Plate waste	700
Total	6,300, about 27,000 a month

Now you know where to aim. In this example overproduction and spoilage are the big two, so forecasting and ordering come before anything else.

3Step 2: match prep to real demand

Most overproduction comes from prepping the same amount every day. Your sales are not the same every day, so your prep shouldn't be either. A simple weekday forecast beats instinct:

Prep quantity = average of the last four same weekdays × (1 + buffer) − usable prep already on hand

Illustration: marinated chicken for shawarma on a Thursday. The last four Thursdays sold 84, 92, 78 and 90 portions, an average of 86. Add a buffer of one tenth: about 95. You have 15 portions marinated yesterday that are still within their safe holding time, so you prep 80 new portions, not the 110 the kitchen is used to making.

Adjust the forecast for the things you already know about:

• Ramadan shifts almost all demand into a narrow iftar window and a smaller suhoor peak. Forecast those windows separately.
• Seasonal locations such as Sahel, Sharm or Hurghada swing hard between high and low season, and even between weekdays and weekends in season.
• Big matches, holidays and school exams change footfall. Keep a note of each and look back at it next year.
• Weather matters for terraces and cold drinks.

Where you can, cook in smaller rounds through service instead of one big batch at 11 am. Rice, fries and grilled items are easy to batch; sauces and marinades are not, so forecast those most carefully. Your POS item sales report gives you the daily counts. On Menyo's Professional plan the sales reports also show day-of-week and hourly patterns, which helps with deciding when to cook each round.

4Step 3: trim the menu and share ingredients

Every ingredient that appears in only one dish is a waste risk. If that dish has a slow week, the ingredient spoils. Go through your menu with a highlighter:

1. List every perishable ingredient.
2. Count how many dishes use each one.
3. Mark every perishable used in only one low-selling dish.

For each marked ingredient, either work it into a second dish (fresh salmon in a salad as well as a main), replace it with something you already stock, or remove the dish. Our menu engineering guide shows how to find the low-margin, low-selling dishes that are the first candidates to go.

A shorter menu is not a smaller business. Fewer ingredients mean tighter ordering, faster prep and fewer things that can go off in the fridge.

5Step 4: fix portions, and tell guests what they are getting

Plate waste is a portion problem. If a third of the fries on a side come back every night, you are paying to throw them away. Weigh what returns on your three most-returned dishes for a week, then act:

• Reduce the default portion of sides that come back and let guests add more.
• Make bread, extra sauce and sides optional instead of automatic.
• Portion with scales and scoops so the plate that leaves the kitchen matches the recipe.

Portion information on the menu helps guests order the right amount. "Serves 2 to 3" on a mixed grill, "250 g" on a steak, or "light portion" on a salad stops a table of four ordering four mains and two platters because nobody could tell how big anything was. That especially helps tourists who don't know local portion sizes.

6Step 5: use the menu to move stock before it spoils

A paper menu can't react to what is in the fridge today. A digital one can.

• Run a daily special from surplus. Too many aubergines? Put a moussaka special at the top of the menu for two days. See setting up daily specials on a QR menu.
• Mark items sold out the moment they run out. Guests stop ordering them, and the kitchen stops improvising substitutions that often end up remade. Our guide to handling 86'd items covers how.
• Pull slow seasonal dishes early rather than waiting for the next reprint.

With Menyo, marking an item sold out is available on every paid plan. On the Professional plan the inventory module also has a waste log where staff record each item with a reason, and a report that shows waste by reason over 7, 30 or 90 days, which replaces the clipboard once the habit is in place.

7Step 6: handle what is left properly

• Label every prepped container with the item and date, and rotate first in, first out.
• Build staff meals from safe surplus and trim, and record them so they don't show up as unexplained variance.
• Use vegetable trim, bones and stale bread in stocks, soups and crumbs where food safety allows.
• For surplus that is safe but won't sell, ask a food bank or local charity about collection. In Egypt, the Egyptian Food Bank is one organisation to contact.

Never keep cooked food beyond its safe holding time to reduce waste on paper. A food safety problem costs far more than a tray of rice.

8Frequently asked questions

How much food waste is normal for a restaurant?

There is no reliable single figure for your concept, and it varies widely by menu and volume. The useful benchmark is your own: measure two weeks, set a target to reduce it, and measure again every month.

What is the fastest way to reduce food waste?

Usually forecasting prep by weekday and cooking in smaller batches, because overproduction tends to be the biggest category. Your two-week log will tell you whether that is true for your kitchen.

Should I track waste on paper or in software?

Start on paper; it builds the habit. Once logging is routine, software saves the weekly costing work and keeps the history, so you can see trends by reason and item.

Do smaller portions really reduce waste without hurting sales?

They can on items that regularly come back half-eaten. Adjust those first, keep an option for larger portions, and watch sales and feedback for a month.

9What to do on Monday

Put a scale and a log sheet next to every bin. Two weeks later, cost the sheets and pick the biggest category. Fix that one first: forecast, trim, portion or sell through. Then measure again.

If you want sold-out updates, daily specials and a waste log in the same system as your menu, start a Menyo trial.