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The importance of CSR commitment to reducing food waste

In the organized catering sector, food waste represents a major challenge. According to estimates, 1.3 billion tonnes of food are thrown away every year. This issue is no longer simply a question of stock management, but is becoming a strategic issue at the heart of Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR). More and more consumers are paying attention to the environmental impact of their food choices, favoring establishments committed to a sustainable approach.

Integrating anti-waste practices into your CSR strategy has a dual advantage. On the one hand, it helps you meet the expectations of customers, who are increasingly concerned about the provenance and management of food products.
On the other, it aligns with constantly evolving environmental regulations, such as the 2020 Agec law, which imposes ambitious food loss reduction targets for 2025 in the distribution and catering sectors.

4 practical tips for integrating food waste reduction into your CSR approach

Reducing food waste in commercial and institutional catering requires concrete actions tailored to the specific features of each establishment.

Optimizing inventory management with predictive tools

Computerized and centralized inventory management is essential for reducing losses. Adopting technological solutions, such as predictive inventory management tools based on sales histories, enables you to adjust your orders to actual demand, while anticipating periods of peak or low activity. This ensures optimal product rotation and reduces the risk of perishability. Use specialized software, increasingly coupled with embedded AI, to monitor product quantities and sell-by dates in real time.

Staff awareness and training

Increasing awareness of the importance of stock rotation, as well as the proper storage of foodstuffs, helps to minimize losses in the kitchen. For example, teaching the simple principles of FIFO (First In, First Out) ensures that the oldest products are used first. Teams should also be trained to identify products still consumable beyond their theoretical use-by date, based on minimum durability dates (MDD).

Utilizing short circuits and unsold food

To limit the environmental impact of sourcing, favor short circuits and local partnerships. This not only reduces the carbon footprint of deliveries, but also guarantees the freshness of products, limiting losses linked to the quality of ingredients. What's more, solutions such as anti-waste baskets give a second life to unsold produce, while winning the loyalty of a new, environmentally-conscious customer base.

Implementing daily waste management

Food losses need to be monitored on a daily basis through loss capture tools directly integrated into your inventory management system. These reports enable you to identify the main sources of waste, whether kitchen losses, unsold items or ordering errors. By analyzing this data, you can adjust portions, optimize menus and avoid repeating costly mistakes.

The economic and ecological benefits of responsible management

The benefits of responsible food waste management are both economic and ecological. By optimizing the use of raw materials and adjusting your supplies, you can significantly reduce your costs while increasing your restaurant's profitability.

At the same time, reusing food waste and adopting sustainable practices can reduce your carbon footprint and strengthen your chain's environmental commitment.

Reducing costs through better optimization of raw materials

Effective inventory management and reduced food waste optimize the use of raw materials, resulting in a direct reduction in costs. By limiting unsold items and adapting purchases to actual sales thanks to order prediction tools (such as those integrated into inventory management software), restaurants can lower their material costs. Rigorous monitoring of discrepancies between theoretical and actual raw material costs is essential to identify avoidable losses, such as discarded or misused products.
These discrepancies are often due to inadequate portion sizes or ordering errors. Adopting anti-waste strategies, such as using precise technical data sheets to standardize recipes and portions, helps to reduce invisible losses while maintaining the quality of the dishes on offer.
This translates not only into improved profitability, but also into greater control over margin management, a crucial element in the foodservice sector where margins are often tight.

Carbon footprint reduction and waste recovery

The fight against food waste is also part of a drive to reduce our ecological footprint. Every food item wasted represents an unnecessary expenditure of natural resources such as water, energy and farmland. What's more, the recovery of food waste through composting or the redistribution of unsold food to charities plays a key role in reducing landfill waste, thus contributing to more sustainable management. By integrating these practices into a CSR policy, restaurants can not only improve their environmental impact, but also reinforce their brand image as players committed to the ecological transition.
Platforms like Too Good To Go and other unsold food recovery solutions make it possible to transform a source of waste into an opportunity, both economic and ecological.

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To further optimize your processes and integrate sustainable practices, Adoria's solutions offer centralized inventory and supply management. With tools specifically designed for multi-site catering chains, you'll be able to improve your profitability while enhancing your positive impact on the environment.

Discover how Adoria can support you in this transition to more responsible catering.

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