Hotels Experiment With Reducing Food Waste: Will All-You-Can-Eat Buffets Be History?
Photo Credit: Hyatt is trying to reduce food waste at its 875 hotels around the world. Buffets are one place to cut down on over-serving of food. This is one at the Hyatt Regency in Amsterdam. Hyatt Hotels
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 producer
