Cooking up a viable waste-cutting solution

• Restaurant in Finland aims for zero-waste and uses an app to help reach the goal
• Up to 50 % reduction in waste already achieved
• Profit is up and the Waste Master tool helps with restaurant planning as well

Restaurant Nolla was founded by three European cooks who met in Finland and wanted to establish an ecological restaurant serving good food. Their ambitious aim was to make Nolla the first zero-waste restaurant in the Nordic countries. The cooks and owners of Nolla use a digital Waste Master (Hävikkimestari) application created by another Finnish company Lassila &Tikanoja to minimise food waste.

Using a tablet, they fed in different characteristics of the waste generated at the restaurant: quality, weight and the reason for its existence. The application tool is easy to use and always close at hand in the kitchen.

In à la carte restaurants like Nolla, there is generally less food waste than that generated in institutional kitchens or buffet-style restaurants. However, Nolla still produced around 30 kg of food waste per week., mainly during meal preparation (e.g. vegetable peeling) rather than plate leftover.

Restaurants using Waste Masrer typically manage to decrease food waste by 30-50 %, sometimes more. A smaller amount of food waste has a direct result on restaurant profitability.

Key benefits

• With the help of the Waste Master tool, the amount of food waste can decrease by 30-50 %.

• Restaurants make more profit when there is less food waste

• The tool gives valuable information about inefficient processes and gives data for planning and managing operations

• The tool is easy to use to measure the amount of food waste and the reports reveal problems in the processes

• The data from the tool trains staff to do the right thing to minimise food waste

• The payback time of the Waste Master is 3-10 months depending on the size of the restaurant