Comensa Group chef Nathan Houpapa is one of the participants in a pilot programme to help the hospitality industry decrease waste to landfill and its greenhouse gas emissions. The results so far have surprised him.
Managing waste well is an ongoing environmental project at Britomart. As well as ensuring recycling streams are available to keep as much waste as possible out of landfill, Britomart also works to support businesses within the precinct to manage and reduce their waste where possible.
One of the trickiest waste streams to manage is food waste, a critical problem in New Zealand: Over 150,000 tonnes of food are thrown away every year, with 25,000 tonnes coming from the restaurant industry. Experts estimate that 61 percent of that waste is avoidable.
With more than 25 restaurants and bars located at Britomart, food waste is a significant issue, one that a waste-reduction initiative named Kai Keepers is designed to begin tackling. It was developed and launched this year by the Ministry for the Environment, Edge Impact (a sustainability consultancy with its New Zealand base at Britomart) and the Restaurant Association.
At Britomart, four restaurants were involved in the Kai Keepers pilot programme: kingi at The Hotel Britomart, Café Hanoi, Ghost Street and Perch (the last three are all owned and operated by Comensa Group). They were among 120 participants across the Auckland, Waikato and Bay of Plenty area that, for a week in March, tracked and weighed their food waste, which was categorised into ‘avoidable’ or ‘unavoidable’.
Edge Impact then analysed the results and data was fed back to each restaurant on their total waste, average waste per customer, with an estimate given how much the food waste was costing the restaurant each week, as well as the GHG impact. This data formed a baseline for later testing of food waste reduction interventions, with an ultimate goal of helping restaurants reduce their waste by 20 percent or more.
Across the one-week period, the 120 participating restaurants served over 108,000 customers, producing more than 13 tonnes of food waste – on average, 171g of food waste per customer. Collectively, the 13,142kg of food waste produced in the week released 1.84 tonnes of carbon dioxide equivalent gases, or about the same amount of carbon dioxide produced by a petrol car driving for a year.
Nathan Houpapa, executive chef at Café Hanoi, Ghost Street and Perch, says the pilot programme has changed the way his team sees and manages food waste. “It was incredibly insightful and quite shocking, actually,” he says. “We’ve carried on with what we were doing in the pilot, because we saw all the benefits of it immediately. And it kind of gave us a bit of an uppercut where we realised that sorting our waste properly isn’t in the too-hard basket like we thought it was.”
To support businesses in minimising their waste to landfill, Britomart provides food waste bins that are sent to a composting facility. However, businesses must be diligent in keeping non-food items like skewers, tinfoil or plastic wrappers out of the bins, or they will be rejected. “We’d get told on a regular basis by the Britomart operations team that our food waste was contaminated and it was going into general waste,” says Nate.
But taking part in the Kai Keepers programme gave them the push they needed to put food sorting systems in place – and to their surprise, it was easier than they imagined. “Separating the liquid waste just took five minutes of thinking,” says Nate. “And the result of sticking with the programme is that it’s reversed the number of red bins [landfill] and green bins [composting] we use. We used to have one green bin and maybe four reds, and now we have one or two reds and the rest are green.”
Another substantial benefit of the programme was gaining black-and-white confirmation that they had been over-serving portions of rice. “We found through monitoring the plate waste that we were giving customers too much rice. So we’ve cut down on the size of the bowls that we’re serving and cut down on our waste, and no one has blinked. And that’s saving us money.”
Next door at kingi, the pilot programme also gave the team a new perspective. Their wastage was calculated at 130g per cover, 41g below the industry average, and although operations manager Ciaran Molloy is pleased that kingi’s waste compared well to the baseline, he was keen to explore opportunities to reduce it further. “I am genuinely surprised that we threw out 150kg of food waste during the course of the week,” says Ciaran. “But a massive thing for us is fish, which have a lot of bones that have heavy calcium in them.
We recycle fish bones or fish heads three or four times, for example, to make fish stock, but that wasn’t within the scope of the pilot, and neither was whether the restaurant’s waste goes to landfill or composting.” The hotel’s waste management system is robust, says Ciaran, with cameras in the bin room to ensure waste streams are separated properly. “We get a report daily on our recycling, our composting, our landfill,” he says. “If I notice a sudden drop in composting and an increase in landfill on the tracker, I can review the footage and take action, whether it’s following up or retraining the team. But we very rarely have issues with the waste and tracking. They’re pretty standard numbers.”
David Maucor from Edge Impact says the Kai Keepers pilot chose to focus on preventing waste reaching the bin, rather than what happens to food waste after that point. “Overwhelmingly the feedback from restaurants was, ‘What can help us improve our margins?’ And I think that’s why reducing food waste upfront is really what interests people. You can be smart about how you deal with food waste once you generate it, through composting it, repurposing, etc, but reducing it upfront helps reduce costs.” The next phase of the programme, which kicked off in November 2024 and extends through the summer, involves testing interventions for reducing waste. At the end of this phase, the success of each of the four interventions will be reported on, so restaurants can choose to implement the ones that will be most effective for them.
