EU Food Loss and Waste Prevention Hub

Environmental awareness and the behavior that goes along with it is becoming more and more common in the everyday life of individuals, companies and organisations. Reducing food waste is an important part of a responsible approach to maintaining our natural resources. The purpose of this guide is to highlight possible solutions to this complex issue in the segment of quick service restaurants.

The guide is intended for entrepreneurs in the field of hospitality and catering, state administrators, non-profits and other stakeholder entities who intend to reduce their food waste and food loss for environmental, economic, social and other reasons. It summarizes the information gained throughout the research project Food waste reduction in hospitality and catering establishments (RedPot), which was conducted with the support of the ÉTA program of the Technology Agency of the Czech Republic during the years 2018–2020. This project is one of the first to map food waste in hospitality and catering establishments in the Czech Republic and makes specific recommendations on how to reduce food waste in the everyday practice of canteen and fast food operations.

At the beginning of this guide you will find information about food waste to acquaint you quickly with the issue. In the next part we summarize the knowledge gained from the field survey — we quantified the loss and waste in quick service restaurants and highlighted their causes. We follow up with a set of possible measures to be taken to prevent or reduce food waste. In this guide you will find ways to reuse unsold food still suitable for human consumption and at the same time we introduce options for the waste management of food which is no longer suitable for human consumption. At the end we introduce a set of recommendations for entities of state administrations and other organisations for better food waste management.