Skift Take
Hotels are known for wanting to please their guests, and feeding them is one way of doing it. But food waste deteriorates the environment. Hotels are making an effort to cut down on it. So they are earning praise for trying, but they have a long way to go.
It was a small way to help solve a big problem.
In an effort to cut down on the amount of food it was wasting, the Kimpton Hotel Monaco Portland in Oregon stopped offering free bread with meals at its Red Star Tavern restaurant. Four months into the experiment, the hotel noticed it used 22.5 fewer pounds of dough a week and 65 fewer pounds of butter a month. Bread was still offered for a small charge, but if guests balked, they would get it for free. Not many complained.
“They didn’t see any missed difference in terms of the quality or satisfaction of the guest,” said Monica McBride, manager of food waste at the World Wildlife Fund (WWF), which encouraged the hotel to experiment with its bread production and consumption. “It freed up the bakers’ time to go do other tasks that were adding more value than producing bread.”
Cutting out a few pounds of bread and butter won’t solve the world’s environmental problem, but the hotel industry is one of the main producers of food, and many leftovers end up in landfills, producing greenhouse gas emissions. The labor, water and energy used to produce the food is also a loss. There’s the humanitarian aspect of it too, with hotels realizing that they are throwing away food from their restaurants and banquet and conference rooms while there are those outside their doors who are in need.
Being kind to the environment has become a big goal of the travel industry, and hotels, in particular, are stepping up their efforts, most notably by eliminating plastic straws and small shampoo single-use containers. But there is also now an appetite to produce only the amount of food they need for their customers or, in the failure to do so, dispose of it in a way that won’t harm the environment. There are various reasons for the self-reflection — both altruistic and financial.
“There’s a
