Natural and organic foods, reduction of waste, and transparency in origin of menu items are among the fastest growing environmentally friendly trends in the foodservice industry.
You know things are starting to change when restaurant giants like McDonald’s and Burger King publicly oppose unethical farm animal practices, reported Nicole Troxell for QSweb.com. Recent news has seen restaurants going green and implementing sustainable practices to conserve energy and provide healthier offerings. Meanwhile, the millennial generation are embracing these environmentally and animal friendly initiatives.
Here are five eco-friendly practices that are having the biggest impact on restaurants:
1. Serving natural/hormone free food
Good Times Restaurants Inc., operator of Good Times Burgers & Frozen Custard, a regional quick-service restaurant chain, introduced all natural bacon system-wide in April, 2015. Following trendsetters like Chipotle, the company’s bacon is nitrate-, hormone- and antibiotic-free, QSweb.com reported.
“Our all natural brand positioning has helped propel dramatic sales increases at Good Times over the last three years,” said Nick Biegel, director of product development. “We continue to take a ‘better food stand’ with our brand and are working to transform the way that people view the quality of food available within the fast food segment. The introduction of all natural bacon augments our fresh, all-natural Angus beef and our all natural, hand breaded chicken and completes the portfolio of our all natural proteins at Good Times. More and more consumers are focusing on where their food comes from and any products that come from humanely raised animals without added hormones, antibiotics or steroids are becoming increasingly important.”
The effort required “a small price increase to cover the increased costs of the all-natural bacon,” Biegel said.
Even ice cream chains, such as Sloan’s Ice Cream, are going the way of natural products. Sloan’s Director of Franchising, David Wild, said the company was a pioneer in banning the artificial growth hormone rBST in their products. The company has always used rBST-free dairy and “[tries] to steer clear of artificial flavorings.”
Wild said he has noticed the trend catching on. “Many ice cream parlors are shifting to the rBST-free dairy as part of a marketing strategy. People like natural, and if you can advertise natural, it makes for a good selling point.”
And there’s monetary incentive from a marketing standpoint, according to Wild, “It goes along the same lines as organic. The company advertises the product as organic and customers will pay the premium price for it.”
Wild said it’s important to “keep up with the times, as customers are starting to care more about what they are consuming and willing to pay for better quality. Natural products are always going to be more expensive as you are not artificially increasing production. However, we believe in this because it is the right thing to do. We have found that customers are willing to spend more but feel better about coming and making the purchases. We in return feel better as we try to be as transparent into what they are consuming.”
2. Informing customers where food comes from
Lamb Weston, a supplier of frozen potato, sweet potato and appetizer products to restaurants, established a “Trace My Fries” website to cater to the growing trends of consumers eager to know the origins of their food. By inputting a 20-digit code found on Lamb Weston-branded french fries, consumers can go to the “Trace My Fries” website, insert the code and learn about the region, soil, sun and temperature of their fries, QSweb.com reported.
A 2014 study by Emerging Faith in Food Production, Sullivan Hidgon & Sink Foodthink, according to Lamb Weston, concluded that “65 percent of consumers indicated that knowing where their food comes from is of high importance.” A study by Regulation Nation, Sullivan Hidgon & Sink Foodthink, 2014, shows that “72 percent of millennials believe they should learn more about the food they’re consuming.”
“We’re helping our customers tell the story of their fries—and it all starts with the potato”, said Ashley James, director of strategy for agriculture services at Lamb Weston. “The farmers we work with take great pride in growing our high quality potatoes, and we are excited to share their story with our customers.”
Lamb Weston hopes the initiative will help operators establish credibility and enhance relationships with their patrons, the company said.
3. Managing waste and conserving resources
“Training your staff correctly has a direct impact on minimizing waste,” said Operation System Trainer Megan Walling, Burger 21, a “better burger” fast casual restaurant.
Burger 21 outlined three crucial steps to minimizing food waste:
- One of the most important ways restaurants can minimize food waste is to make sure that staff in charge of ordering food for the restaurant have a strong understanding of food rotation. This understanding will help preserve the freshness of product and prevent unnecessary waste.
- Second, methods must be in place to ensure recipes are being prepared to the exact specifications outlined. Staff must have thorough and consistent training in order to execute precisely.
- Finally, make sure the same staff is responsible for taking inventory, whether it’s on a weekly, bi-weekly or monthly basis. Everyone has a different way of counting, so by having the same team member handle inventory, errors can be reduced or eliminated. It’s also beneficial to have back-office software for managing things such as inventory, invoicing and reporting. This has greatly helped our restaurants’ managers better track each and every inventory item in real-time, including waste.
At Burger 21, opening managers make a detailed prep list and complete the opening line check for the day, QSweb.com reported.
“This requires them to go through every inch of the kitchen inspecting the food, as well as creating correct on-hand counts for an accurate prep list,” said Chef Mike Remes. “We rely heavily on our Kitchen Reference Manual (KRM), along with various charts and job aids outlining our specifications to yield exact recipes. For instance, we provide our team members with a ‘B the Right Size Cut Chart,’ which lists all of the items we hand-cut and their correct measurements. We make it easy so that a team member could literally hold up a piece of onion to the chart and measure their cut to make sure it meets the correct specifications.
“In addition, we try to get the most yield of each ingredient by repurposing parts that would typically be thrown away,” said Remes. “For instance, we take the ends of our sliced jalapenos that would typically be discarded and use them in our sauces. Any red onions that are too small to put on burgers are finely diced for our salsa. We record any waste we have on a log sheet throughout the day and input it into our inventory system on a nightly basis so that our food is always accounted for.”
The company’s data shows savings of 2-3 percent on food costs through the use of accurate targeting vs. actual reporting, QSweb.com reported.
BURGERFI, also a better burger fast casual restaurant, served its first all-natural burger in 2011, making a commitment at the same time to sustainability as part of standard business practices, the company said. The company’s goals were to minimize its carbon footprint by employing a variety of environmentally-friendly best practices, QSweb.com reported.
BURGERFI now recycles peanut oil, milk jugs, Coca-Cola bottles, conserves water and more.
The data demonstrate BURGERFI’s successful sustainability efforts:
- 1,076,400 pounds of peanut oil are recycled into biodiesel fuel every year
- 701,040 milk jugs are upcycled to make the large picnic tables and four-top tables located throughout all BURGERFI restaurants
- 150,960 Coca-Cola bottles are upcycled to make the chairs featured chain-wide throughout all BURGERFI restaurants
- 20,000 gallons of water are saved (and less chemicals used) annually chain-wide due to BURGERFI’s three-compartment washing sinks
- 35 tons of paper towels are saved per year chain wide through BURGERFI’s hand drying systems – this translates to 621 trees saved per year
- Each BURGERFI location uses two large ceiling fans per location – these fans use 66 percent less electricity
- Wood panels on BURGERFI’s walls are made from number 2 pine lumber, which is the most renewable timber source available
Subway Restaurants are also jumping on the sustainability bandwagon, with projects designed to transform the company into an environmentally and socially responsible business. Over the last several years, Subway has implemented new policies and practices to reach their goals, including remodeling stores with energy efficient electricity, low-flow faucets and more, QSweb.com reported.
Highlights of the data detailing the changes Subway has made include:
- All new and remodeled stores now use energy efficient lighting saving electricity. In 2014, these measures saved an estimated 25 million kWh, enough to power 2,296 average US residences for a year.
- Low-flow faucets/taps that increase the water pressure for rinsing are standard for all new Subway restaurants. This small change saves 277 million gallons of water annually.
- American or Swiss? By removing the paper interleaf between sliced cheeses, an additional 450,000 pounds of paper has been removed from Subway’s waste stream annually.
- Plastic salad bowls and lids and catering trays are made with 95 percent post-consumer recycled content and can also be recycled. This process allowed Subway to divert 209.8 million bottles from landfills last year.
4. Supporting ethical treatment and implementing sustainable systems
McDonald’s, Burger King, DineEquity (owner of restaurant icons IHOP restaurants and Applebee’s), Denny’s, Einstein Noah Restaurant Group and more, with the help of the Humane Society of the United States, have committed to opposing farming practices that immobilize animals, QSweb.com reported.
McDonald’s has also joined the The Coalition for Sustainable Egg Supply, an organization comprised of animal welfare scientists, academic institutions, non-government organizations, egg suppliers, and restaurant/foodservice and food retail companies, along with food suppliers Sysco and Tyson, among others. CSES initiated research in 2010 to evaluate the conventional cage, enriched colony and cage-free aviary laying hen housing system. The company considered the impact of each type of housing for the study on animal health and well-being, food safety and quality, environment, worker health and safety, and food affordability, QSweb.com reported.
“Sustainable egg production involves assessing the well-being of the hens, the environmental impact associated with production, the health and safety of the employees working in the hen housing systems, and ensuring food safety,” Dr. Joy Mench, CSES co-scientific director, and professor of animal science at University of California, Davis, said.
“To achieve sustainability in a food production system, a variety of factors should be considered, one of them being whether the product can remain affordable for restaurant operators and their customers. If not, then the system is not sustainable,” she added.
The research aims to provide restaurant operators and other food system stakeholders with science-based information on sustainability factors to guide informed production and purchasing decisions, the company said.
According to Mench, if restaurants prioritize low cost eggs, they will choose a housing system for hens that produces the most affordably, QSweb.com reported.
“A different operation may view providing hens the ability to exhibit natural behaviors, or minimizing environmental impacts, as most important to them, and would choose eggs produced in the system that best addresses those goals,” she said.
Mench thinks restaurants should support sustainable egg production to ensure that the systems that produce the eggs are socially and environmentally responsible, but said that one specific type of egg production does not fit the goals and values of all restaurant operations, QSweb.com reported.
“There are different costs associated with producing eggs in each of the three systems. The Coalition’s research found that cage-free aviary eggs were 36 percent more expensive to produce than those in conventional cages. It was also found that eggs were 13 percent more expensive to produce in the enriched colony system than in conventional cages.
“Another important finding was that with proper management, safe eggs can be produced in each of the three systems. That’s key because it means operators can serve eggs and consumers can enjoy eggs with confidence that they’re safe,” Mench said.
The research also indicated substantial differences in hen mortality in the different systems. Mortality in the conventional cage and enriched colony systems were each below 5 percent. Conversely, mortality in the cage-free system was more than 11 percent, largely due to behavioral issues in the flock, QSweb.com reported.
“Of course, hen mortality is influenced by factors other than the housing system itself, and it is possible that differences in management could lead to reduced mortality in cage-free operations. This highlights the important role that the Coalition study played in identifying areas for improvement in all hen housing systems,” Mench added.
5. Deploying technology that conserves and saves
Subway is leveraging the latest technology to cut down on paper waste, conserve power during restaurant down times and improve overall efficiency so that operations are sustainable and environmentally sound, QSweb.com reported.
Technological initiatives include:
Provision dynamic virtual/cloud systems — Automation can optimize an IT department’s use of cloud and virtual resources, allocating additional computing resources when needed, as well as powering down resources during idle times. As a result, organizations can eliminate resource waste and reduce operational costs.
Onboard and offboard employees — Organizations can minimize the wait time of adding new employees into their Human Resources and Accounting systems by creating an automated process as soon as an employee is hired. As a result, organizations will avoid time-consuming and error-prone manual onboarding processes that require significant maintenance.
Streamline reporting — IT organizations can streamline and consolidate reporting by using parameters instead of hard-coding, resulting in reports being run once rather than hundreds of times. This offers users greater visibility over workload performance so potential processing bottlenecks can be quickly identified, and workload processing and runtimes can be analyzed.
Subway recommends restaurants implement the following to maintain eco-friendly practices:
- High efficiency HVAC (Heating, ventilation and cooling) equipment
- Energy Star rated equipment
- High efficiency lighting program
- Low flow faucets and low flow or dual flush toilets
- Motion sensor lighting controls in restrooms
- Day light sensors in guest area
- LED interior and exterior signage
- Non-smoking environment
- Outside air monitoring of CO2
- Indoor air quality management during construction
- Reuse of at least 30 percent of store furniture
- Forest Steward Council-certified wood moldings
- Low VOC (volatile organic compounds) materials, paints, adhesives
- Electrical sub metering and thermal comfort monitoring
- Certified green cleaning program
- Recycling and construction waste management program
- LEED/Eco Restaurant educational material
- Furniture products not manufactured with or containing ozone depleting substances
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