For most restaurateurs, the concept of a “sustainable restaurant” starts with survival. Navigating the pandemic, unprecedented supply chain disruptions and staffing challenges has meant making hard decisions just to keep the doors open.
That’s why any conversation about sustainability—the environmental kind—in food service has to come with practical solutions that solve everyday problems and help operators grow their business. The Northeast has become a hotbed for sustainable restaurant solutions, and those success stories are giving other operators a roadmap for cutting costs, increasing revenue and expanding their customer base.
Staying Local to Reduce Carbon Footprint
It’s no surprise that the proprietors of Forage wanted to make sure they had a sustainability story to tell when they opened near Harvard University, in Cambridge, Mass. Even in 2016, discerning customers wanted to know how and where their meals were sourced. That led chef Eric Cooper to build a menu that focuses almost completely on dishes prepared with raw materials from the area—and emphasizes vegetables over meat, which contributes to more than two thirds of all greenhouse gas production. Cooper’s menu changes daily to account for the ever-changing mix of ingredients he can source and use for multiple purposes so that potential waste can be turned into flavoring or garnish for other menu items.
Even bars are getting into the intensely local act. Philadelphia’s Post Haste has oriented how it positions and markets its mixed drinks by how far the ingredients had to travel to get to its East Kensington location. That means making drinks with Pennsylvania craft spirits instead of single
malts from Scotland or Mexican tequila. The sourcing goal? Pick ingredients that only come from East of the Mississippi, and emphasize personal relationships with producers over bulk suppliers. It doesn’t mean drinks are wildly expensive, either. One made with Pennsylvania rye, applejack and burnt sugar syrup is $13, and a non-alcoholic concoction made of black tea, oat milk and Appalachian allspice is $10.
Emphasize Recycling and Composting
Restaurants produce a shocking amount of food waste: Up to 40 percent of food that reaches a customer’s plate doesn’t get consumed, which costs restaurants both when sourcing raw materials and when they have to dispose of that waste. Where the average restaurant meal produces more than a half pound of food waste—waste that has to be disposed of by the restaurant—Forage produces less than a five-gallon bucket of compost per day. That dramatically reduces their refuse bills.
In Connecticut, Brew Bakers both sends food scraps to a local composting company and encourages its employees to take leftover food for their own compost piles. The effort is putting a significant dent in the more than 500,000 tons of solid food waste going into Connecticut’s landfill system, but even more importantly for operators, the programs are more than paying for themselves. Composting and recycling plans produce roughly $7 in savings for every dollar spent.
Waste cooking oil is another enormous opportunity for restaurant owners to stay local and embrace recycling. Instead of sending waste cooking oil to the landfill, recyclers like Lifecycle Renewables keep the oil in the local energy supply chain by buying it from restaurants in the Northeast and turning it into carbon neutral heating oil that is sold on to educational and municipal clients like Harvard University for their central boiler systems.
Predictive Analytics Cut Waste
Add up the food customers don’t eat from their plates with the raw materials that never even get there and restaurateurs are losing more than $25 billion per year. With better data—and the technology to capture it—operators can make more informed decisions that can turn that waste into profit. Customer-facing artificial intelligence like hyper-customized menus that can be based on previous orders (captured within a loyalty program) and real-time operations information—anything from what orders would be quickest to come out of the kitchen to what is the most popular at the moment—not only give customers more choices but also give operators much better data on which to base their purchasing decisions.
Any commodity a restaurant regularly buys (or needs to toss) can be more efficiently handled with better data vs. a seat-of-the-pants approach. One example? Restaurants that rely on rote “bus route” pickup schedules from a waste oil retrieving contractor can often find themselves in a messy situation when a holding tank overflows. Lifecycle Renewables usings industry-leading predictive tech to seamlessly schedule custom pickups for restaurant clients with no mess and no hassle. They get paid and save valuable time.
To learn more about sustainable restaurant success stories and planning, talk to a Lifecycle Renewables recycling advisor today.
