Getting Started with Food Waste Monitoring: A Beginner's Guide

You've decided to get serious about food waste. Maybe you've read about the potential savings, maybe there's regulatory pressure coming, maybe it's a sustainability initiative from above. Whatever the reason, you're starting from scratch.

Here's how to go from zero visibility to meaningful action without overcomplicating it.

Week 1: Establish Your Baseline

Before you change anything, understand what's happening now. You need a baseline to measure improvement against.

Get a scale. A decent platform scale that can handle 20kg+ and reads to the nearest 100g. Put it near your main waste bins. Cost: €50-100.

Create simple categories. Don't over-complicate. Start with three:

• Prep waste (everything from food production)
• Plate waste (what comes back from customers)
• Spoilage (expired or damaged items)

Weigh everything for one week. At the end of each shift, weigh each category. Record it in a spreadsheet or even a paper log. The goal is consistency, not sophistication.

At the end of the week, you have your baseline. Total waste weight, split by category, averaged over a normal operating week.

Week 2-3: Analyse and Calculate

Now make sense of the data.

Calculate your waste percentage. Total waste weight ÷ total food purchased (from your suppliers that week). This gives you waste as a percentage—the key metric for benchmarking.

Calculate waste cost. Take your waste weight, estimate the average value per kg (look at what's actually in the bins), and multiply. Or use a simpler method: food purchases × waste percentage = approximate waste value.

Add the multiplier. True waste cost includes labour, disposal, and energy. Multiply your waste value by 1.3 for a rough true cost estimate.

Identify your categories. Which is largest—prep, plate, or spoilage? This tells you where to focus.

At this point you should be able to answer: "We waste about X% of our food purchases, costing us approximately €Y per month, and most of it is [category]."

Week 4: Your First Interventions

Start with the obvious stuff. You don't need sophisticated analysis to see low-hanging fruit.

If prep waste is dominant:

• Watch your team prep. Are they over-trimming?
• Check your yields—are recipes accurate?
• Look at what's consistently in the prep bin. Same items every day?

If plate waste is dominant:

• Which dishes come back uneaten?
• Are portions too large?
• Are there sides nobody eats?

If spoilage is dominant:

• How's your stock rotation?
• Are you over-ordering certain items?
• Is your storage organised effectively?

Pick one or two specific interventions. Don't try to fix everything at once. Implement them and keep measuring.

Month 2: Build the Rhythm

Initial measurement is easy because it's new and interesting. The challenge is sustaining it. Build waste tracking into your regular operations.

Daily weighing. Make it part of closing routine. Whoever's on close weighs the bins, records the numbers. Takes 5 minutes.

Weekly review. A standing item in your weekly team meeting or management review. What did the numbers show? What are we doing about it?

Monthly reporting. Even a simple summary: this month's waste %, comparison to last month, top three wasted items, actions taken.

The goal is making waste visible enough that it stays on the agenda without requiring heroic effort.

Month 3-6: Iterate and Expand

As basic measurement becomes routine, you can get more sophisticated:

More granular tracking. Instead of just "prep waste," track specific items—beef trim, vegetable peels, overproduced pasta.

Station-level data. If you have multiple prep stations, identify which generates most waste.

Shift-level comparison. Is the morning shift more wasteful than evening? Different days of the week?

Menu-level analysis. Connect waste to specific dishes. Which menu items generate disproportionate waste?

Each layer of detail reveals new intervention opportunities.

When to Consider Technology

Manual tracking works, but it has limits. Consider automated monitoring when:

Compliance is inconsistent. If data quality depends heavily on who's working, you're not getting reliable information.

Scale justifies cost. A €200/month system needs to save at least €300/month in waste to make financial sense. Larger operations hit this threshold easily.

You want real-time visibility. Manual data is always delayed. Automated systems show what's happening now.

Reporting demands increase. Sustainability reports, client requirements, regulatory compliance—automated data is more defensible.

There's no universal "right time" for technology. But if manual tracking isn't delivering reliable data and consistent improvement, it's time to evaluate alternatives.

Common Beginner Mistakes

Going too detailed too fast. Trying to track 50 different categories from day one leads to burnout. Start simple, add detail as you build capability.

Measuring but not acting. Data without action is just documentation. Every measurement cycle should lead to at least one decision.

Expecting immediate results. Waste reduction takes time. Don't abandon your approach after two weeks because numbers haven't changed.

Blaming staff. Waste is usually a systems problem, not a people problem. Over-trimming happens because training was poor or recipes weren't clear, not because staff don't care.

Comparing to irrelevant benchmarks. Your fine dining restaurant shouldn't compare to a fast-food outlet. Compare to similar operations and to your own history.

The Mindset Shift

The point of waste monitoring isn't to create data. It's to create a culture where waste is visible, understood, and actively managed.

In a good operation, waste is discussed regularly. Staff understand why it matters. Interventions are tested and measured. Improvement is expected and celebrated.

That culture doesn't emerge overnight. It's built through consistent attention over months and years.

Calculate your potential savings, or talk to us about starting your waste reduction journey with the right approach.