I've walked through hundreds of commercial kitchens over the years. The bin area tells you everything you need to know about how a place is run. Some kitchens, you see the odd bit of trim, some plate scrapings. Others look like someone's just emptied the walk-in straight into the skip.
Most chefs I talk to reckon they've got waste under control. They're usually wrong by about 40%.
The numbers are brutal: a typical commercial kitchen wastes somewhere between 8% and 12% of everything it buys. On a monthly food spend of €100k, that's €8-12k in the bin. Every month. And about three-quarters of that waste is completely avoidable—it's not bones and peelings, it's perfectly good food that got over-ordered, over-prepped, or forgotten about in the back of the fridge.
You're Probably Counting Wrong
When people try to calculate their waste cost, they look at what they threw away and work out what they paid for it. That's not wrong, but it's incomplete.
Think about what happens before food hits the bin. Someone unpacked it, stored it, moved it around. Someone prepped it—washed, chopped, cooked. All on your payroll. Industry research suggests labour adds another 20-30% to the cost of any food you waste. Then there's the disposal itself: bin collections, grease trap maintenance, waste levies. That fridge running 24/7 to keep food cold that you're about to throw away.
Add it up and the real cost of waste is typically 1.3x the purchase price. That €10k of binned food? Closer to €13k when you factor in everything else.
Work Out Your Numbers
Play with the calculator below. Be honest about your waste percentage—if you don't actually know, 10% is a reasonable starting point for most operations.
احسب تكلفة الهدر في مطبخك
التكلفة السنوية الحقيقية
495k د.إ
شاملة التكاليف المخفية
التوفير المحتمل
248k د.إ
مع تخفيض بنسبة 50%
Run those numbers past your accountant if you want to see them go pale.
Where's It All Going?
WRAP did extensive research on this. Across UK hospitality, waste breaks down roughly as:
- Prep waste (45%) — over-trimming, peeling loss, prep mistakes
- Plate waste (34%) — what comes back from customers
- Spoilage (21%) — things that expire before you can use them
The interventions are different for each. Prep waste is a training and standardisation problem. Plate waste is portion sizing and menu design. Spoilage is ordering frequency and stock rotation.
Most kitchens have one category that's way out of line. The audit tells you which one.
The 50% Target Isn't Fantasy
SDG 12.3 commits signatories to halving food waste by 2030. Sounds ambitious until you realise plenty of hospitality businesses have already hit it, some within 18 months of getting serious about measurement.
On our earlier example: cut waste in half and you're saving €62k a year. That's real money. It's a salary. It's a kitchen refit. It's margin you can reinvest.
What to Do This Week
You don't need to buy anything to start. Pick one:
Run an audit. Get staff to sort waste into prep, plate, and spoilage for a week. Weigh each category daily. The results will tell you where to focus.
Look at your top 5 wasted items. There's always a few items that show up in the bin constantly. Find out why. Over-ordered? Recipe yield wrong? Customers not eating it? Each problem has a solution.
Calculate the cost. Use the calculator above. Sometimes just seeing the annual number is enough to change behaviour.
When Monitoring Makes Sense
Manual tracking works, but it relies on busy staff remembering to log things. Compliance tends to start strong and fade. The data's often a few days old by the time you see it.
Automated monitoring removes the human element—everything gets captured, identified, weighed. You see what's happening in real time. Trends become obvious. The typical payback is 3-6 months, and improvement tends to compound because you're building awareness into the kitchen culture.
But that's a decision for later. Start with knowing your numbers.
Try our full ROI calculator if you want a more detailed breakdown, or request a free savings report and we'll model it for you.