Minimizing food waste in our hotels

It’s hard to understate the preciousness of food. It was humanity’s mastery of the harvesting of food that allowed us to build civilizations. Through food science and agricultural technologies, we were able to figure out how to sustain the 7.7 billion people on the planet when only 60 years ago, scientists predicted we would run out of food on the planet. Now, we live in a world where nearly one-third of food is wasted or spoiled alongside a growing population of nearly 800 million people around the planet that go to bed hungry each night. Thus food is precious and we at Iberostar want to do our part to ensure it does not go to waste. Food waste also has a considerable impact on global climate change. Every year, nearly 3 billion tonnes of CO2e are generated because of food waste. If food waste were a country, it would be the third-largest emitter after the US and China, and 3 billion tonnes of CO2e is also around the size of the impact of the entire Travel and Tourism sector. 

Food waste can also have a strong impact on a business’s bottom line. Studies have shown that food waste on average can be cut in half for any service provider who has not begun their own journey to reduce food waste, representing savings ranging from 8-20% of food costs. 

What does tackling food waste look like at Iberostar? First, it means doing all we can to avoid food waste in the first place. We do this by training our employees, but we also do this through some pretty innovative ways of reducing the amount of waste we create without ever affecting the customer experience. In some cases, we’re even making a better food experience and tackling food waste simultaneously. Whether through reducing our plate sizes or increasing the amount of show cooking we perform, our leaders in our food and beverage service are fully committed to our cause. 

Our kitchen professionals lead Iberostar kitchens with speed and efficiency. However, we also needed help on the measurement and quantification of the food waste that we were generating and the technology we introduced to Iberostar just this past year. 

Though we are beginning our journey towards tackling food waste, we understand that it will play a major role in reducing our total waste sent to landfill. By using cutting-edge technology, training and innovation to ensure we minimize our food waste, we hope to contribute to reducing climate stressors, feeding the next billion and inspiring our clients to come on this journey with us.

At Iberostar, tackling food waste means having a system that can allow us to measure and categorize what we are throwing away. While that seems simple at first, when you bring it to the scale of an industrial kitchen with thousands of chefs worldwide as part of our incredible gastronomic team, we depend on technology. Specifically, we’re proud to be working with Winnow Solutions, a company based out of the UK that creates an AI-enabled tool that allows kitchens to automatically track food waste. Soon we will share news about our progress using this system!