Consumers are always being encouraged to Biggie Size it, to purchase the value meal, or to buy more food than is absolutely necessary. This trend is not only bad for our health, but it is bad for the environment. If you have ever worked in the back of the house as a cook or prepper, you understand that the food waste of a single restaurant can be staggering.

Although there is a loss of product (read: waste) inherent in mass food production and preparation, it is the food not consumed by customs that accounts for most of the waste. As consumer are pushed into buying more food, or bigger portions, the problem of waste is only exacerbated.

While food waste breaks down in landfills more easily than Styrofoam and other synthetic products, it still takes up landfill space. Further, the problem of food waste is not necessarily about the end product of the waste, but a more accumulative measurement.

The steps that go into producing each plate of food require a large amount of energy. Just think about it is terms of fuel use: to get the food on the plate we need the gas that goes into the tractors to harvest the wheat, the gas that fuels the trucks that brings the food from the farm to the distributor then to the restaurant, to the gas used to power the grill the food is cooked on. Now, if you add the amount of energy it takes to keep all the food at the proper temperatures, as well as the amount of energy needed to run the stove, the oven, and the deep fryer, you can begin to visualize the enormity of it all.

While consumers can object to bigger portions until they turn blue, it is the restaurant owners that can really make a difference in reducing the amount of food waste generated by their restaurants.

In order to fully understand how much food is being wasted at your restaurant, there is an easy, and temporary, procedure you can put into place that will accurately measure restaurant waste. While a ‘food audit’ may sound a little scary, the process is quite painless. The only materials needed are three garbage cans (or six pickle buckets), a scale and a dedicated dishwasher.

The first thing you have to do is to educate your staff about why you are performing a food audit. Not surprisingly, when you bring the topic of food waste up with a group of servers, they often have a lot to tell you about how many half-eaten sandwiches and barely touched desserts they are forced to throw away daily. The point is, servers can offer you an insight on wasted food that you might otherwise miss when dealing with the upper-management of the restaurant.

Next, you need to enlist your most trusted dishwasher. This process will be for naught if the dishwasher does not do exactly what s/he is supposed to do. Think of this process like a scientific experiment: everything has to go according to the rules, or the end result is not reliable.

Lastly, you are going to have all your staff bring each plate of uneaten food to the dishwasher. (Many times, a restaurant will have a ‘dumping station’ where they clear the dishes before taking them to the dish well. This can not happen because you will need ALL wasted food to be handed over to the dishwasher.) The dishwasher will then separate the food into three categories: meat, veggie and dairy waste. Sometimes food will become mashed together somewhere along the line, so just pick the categories that represents the majority of the food on the plate.

At the end of the night, the dishwasher will weigh the contents of each bucket. The final numbers will show you how much of each product is being wasted. The breakdown of product can show you the areas where you should decrease portion sizes. For example, if you have an abundance of veggie waste, it probably means your salads are so big that people are unable to finish them.

I suggest that you continue this process for an entire week, and then calculate the averages of each for categories. The most important step of a food audit is the conclusion. If you are armed with the knowledge of how much food your restaurant wastes, it will be hard not to want to make changes in your portion sizes.

Besides being an environmentally-conscious step in the right direction, a food audit is a good way to save a ton of money. If your restaurant wastes 17lbs of dairy every week, imagine how much money is thrown in the trash each year!

To learn more about food waste, check out these fascinating facts!