Catering in scotland magazine 
Editor's Welcome
A recent report by the Waste & Resources Action Programme (WRAP), entitled 'The Food We Waste in Scotland', found that Scottish households throw away 570,000 tonnes of food each year, which equates to £430 per household, or nearly 1.8 million tonnes of CO2; in other words, the same as taking one in four cars off the road.
WRAP has also commissioned a study on hospitality waste in the UK, which, when it's published, will be based on a survey and compositional audit of food, drink and packaging waste generated from hotels, pubs, and restaurants. This does not bode well for the catering and hospitality sector; if our households are discarding £1 billion-worth of food each year, can you imagine the amounts being thrown out by our industry in the UK as a whole?
Alarmingly, the most popular foodstuffs being jettisoned into domestic drains and landfill throughout Scotland, also feature prominently on hotel menus. These include bread slices (£35 million a year); yoghurts and yoghurt drinks (£26 million a year); milk (£24 million a year) and – somewhat tragically - wine (£37 million a year).
While WRAP are targeting the source of the problem in households – that is to say they are taking the educational approach by advising people to plan more meals in advance before heading out to the supermarket – it remains to be seen how they will tackle the myriad waste-related challenges faced by the hospitality sector.
The contract catering industry, meanwhile, is working hard to address the problems they face and several of them are coming up with some fairly imaginative strategies for minimising their impact on the environment.
In other areas, it might take a little longer to sink in. However, one thing is certain; with landfill charges set to double within the next two years, and an increasing sense of customer loyalty for sustainable companies and brands, we'll have to do something about it soon, or the more lackadaisical organisations among us will be left behind, crawling around on a mountain of chip wrappers and rotting vegetables.
Now, I'm no muesli-munching, carrot-crunching home-made eco-warrior but it would appear that if we spent a little more time planning, storing, preparing or managing the portions in our restaurants, cafes, hotels and pubs, we'd no doubt all be considerably better off.
Hell, if we drank half the wine we wasted, we'd probably not even notice there was a problem in the first place.
Alex Buchanan
