Room for improvement

Summer is the busiest time of year for the UK’s hotel industry. London is heaving with tourists and in many of our seaside towns and rural beauty spots the holiday season is well underway.

Tourism is a major contributor to the UK economy, and it could also be a major contributor in our battle to reduce, reuse and recycle. In fact there is a massive opportunity to encourage and enable hotels to help tackle the food waste mountain.

WRAP estimates that UK hotels waste 79,000 tonnes of food each year at a cost of £318m. Hotels throw away over 20% of the food they purchase on average but over half of this is avoidable. In addition, for every £1 of food waste, a further 50 pence or more is lost to labour, energy and waste collection costs, increasing the size of the opportunity.

At Winnow we are on a mission to help the hospitality industry cut down on food waste by making the kitchen ‘smarter’. We do this via the Winnow Smart Meter, a set of smart scales and accompanying tablet app that lets kitchen staff easily log what is thrown away. The data is then uploaded to the cloud, analysed by Winnow’s algorithm and disseminated so that food waste can be reduced.

Energy efficiency

Many hotels have adopted programmes to make their accommodation more energy efficient and cut operating expenses. Energy efficient lighting for example can bring energy efficiencies of 25-30% but the return on investment is typically between one and three years.

In contrast, food waste reduction programmes can payback in six to 12 months and cut avoidable food waste costs by 40-60%. Furthermore, energy efficiency programmes can be complex and disruptive to implement but tackling food waste is simple without causing disruption to the everyday operations of a hotel.

Cutting food waste makes business sense because food and beverage expenses make up a larger portion of a hotel’s running costs compared to those associated with rooms. Hotels generate 65% of revenue from room bookings and only 25% from food and beverage sales on average, yet accommodation costs range between 15% and 25% of revenue in contrast to 50% to 60% for food and drink. Therefore, tackling food waste could considerably improve a hotels’ gross profit margin.

Hotel owners and anyone running a foodservice outlet should consider all available options when it comes to cutting costs and improving profits. Any sensible sustainability, or business strategy for that matter, should consider food waste reduction as one of the best untapped opportunities to improve the bottom line.