Travel Takes on Food Waste

Chris O'Brien | February 13, 2023


Leanpath tracks waste with scales and computers in kitchens to help companies make better “forecasting, production and purchasing decisions,” Mansel said. Interest in reducing waste has grown, he added, as food has become more expensive. According to Leanpath, for every $1 hotels invest in programs to reduce food waste, they save $7 in operating costs.“Customers are coming to us because they need their kitchens to be more cost-efficient, but they’re also keenly aware that there is a strong pull from a lot of customers, and also staff internally, that we need to be better stewards of resources, better stewards of the food that we buy and serve,” Mansel said. “It’s starting to be expected from shareholders. Understanding food waste is turning into one of those absolutely vital kitchen disciplines.”

Here are some of ways that each travel sector is tackling food waste.

Airlines

Airlines incinerate or landfill approximately $4 billion worth of untouched food and beverages annually, IATA estimates.It’s a problem the industry hopes to improve upon as part of its overall efforts to reduce aviation’s carbon footprint.

But laws geared toward protecting the spread of food-borne illnesses to animals generally rules out reusing unserved catering from international flights, forcing untouched food into incinerators.

IATA hopes to change that and asserts that any real risk from contaminated airline meals is negligible. It is lobbying governments to undertake quantitative assessments and adopt risk-based regulations related to serving unused food.

Airlines are also implementing creative customer-facing programs aimed at reducing food waste.

Beginning last spring, Swiss began offering to-go meals of unused food at substantially reduced prices to passengers on the final daily flight back to its hubs in Zurich and Geneva. Flyers who make a purchase through the Swiss Saveurs to Go program don’t know what they’ll receive: It depends on what’s left once onboard service ends. The carrier tells flyers that the to-go offerings are part of Swiss’ efforts to reduce cabin waste.

“We don’t want passengers to only buy because it’s so much cheaper,” said Trisha Baumeler, who oversees the airline’s onboard sustainability initiatives. “We want to on-board them on the food waste problem.”Over the program’s first eight months, Swiss sold 19,000 meals that otherwise would have been wasted, she said. Swiss also launched preflight ordering initiatives geared toward better inventory management. Economy-class customers on flights from Zurich and Geneva can order early at discounted prices for short- and medium-length flights. Business and first-class customers flying long-haul from those hubs get access to expanded menus when ordering early.

By incentivizing purchases ahead of takeoff, Baumeler said, the carrier can more accurately estimate how much food it needs to stock for each flight.

Still, the most substantial way Swiss has reduced food waste recently is by doing away with free economy meals on flights within Europe in 2021. The change enabled Swiss to collect better data on how many meals are typically eaten on given flights, contributing to a food waste reduction of 50% between 2021 and 2022.

An initiative introduced by Japan Airlines in late 2020 takes an even more direct approach: Under the Ethical Choice Meal Skip program, customers on international flights can opt out of meal service preflight. The airline said that, on average, 2% to 3% of flyers take that option. “While currently we are reducing just a few meals per flight, cumulatively over time, we anticipate the reduction of food waste will be significant,” the carrier said.

Cruise

When a cruise company serves thousands of guests three meals a day on a ship at sea, creativity is required to handle leftover food.

Norwegian Cruise Line (NCL) has a unique approach. Bartenders at the Metropolitan Bar on the Norwegian Prima repurpose items like banana peels, watermelon rinds and day-old or “ugly” croissants into ingredients for “sustainable” cocktails.

The most popular drink on the menu has been the Croissant Mai Tai which uses almond pastries that “were not beautiful enough to be displayed and eaten,” said Wes Cort, NCL’s vice president of food and beverage. The pastries are reduced into a syrup that is poured into the Croissant Mai Tai, giving it “a subtle, sweet flavor.” Other cocktails include a margarita made with a watermelon rind cordial and an old fashioned made with banana peel syrup. Ships across the NCL fleet offer scaled-down versions of the sustainable cocktail menu.

Royal Caribbean International’s chief strategy is to minimize food waste in the first place, said Linken D’Souza, the line’s vice president of food and beverage. The crew’s tools to accomplish that range from spatulas to high-tech solutions. Whether it’s using tomato cores in salsa or pico de gallo or a spatula to scrape every last drop from a bowl, the line employs a “waste-not” strategy, he said. That includes repurposing buffet items that don’t get eaten, such as leftover bread for bread pudding and transitioning food into ingredients for salads and sandwiches.

Royal uses technology to record how much of a product people eat, for example, by weighing a pan of lasagna before and after it’s on the buffet to see how much is left. Over time, those data points build a dashboard to help the line make smarter decisions about how much lasagna and other buffet options it should make.“What if it means that we can get one less tractor-trailer a week of deliveries?” said D’Souza, adding that food savings reduce the line’s carbon footprint.

This long game of data collection can also forecast what foods are popular on port days versus sea days. Overall, the system has helped Royal reduce food waste by about 25%. D’Souza wants to see an eventual reduction of 50%.

There will always be food that ends up as waste, whether left on guests’ plates or traditionally unusable items like pineapple crowns and cantaloupe rinds. Historically, cruise lines would grind such waste into chunks about an inch in diameter before discharging them into the water at least 12 miles from shore, said Bill Burke, Carnival Corp.’s chief maritime officer.Now, Burke said, Carnival’s nine brands use food digesters that act like a stomach housing micro-organisms and enzymes to consume the waste and break it down into a watery pulp.

Last year, more than 600 biodigesters across those brands digested about 80 million pounds of food waste.

“Had it gone to a landfill, it would have released about 30 metric tons of carbon dioxide. What we’re doing is avoiding all of that,” Burke said. “It’s the best that anybody can do today at sea.”

Small ships are also working to reduce food waste. Uniworld Boutique River Cruises began working with Leanpath in 2021 on its S.S. Antoinette and saw a 15% reduction in food waste over a three-month period. Fleetwide rollout of the Leanpath system began last year, and all told, six ships prevented about 29,000 pounds of food from going to waste, averting nearly 100 tons of carbon emissions.

The river cruise line is now on track to reduce food waste by 50% across all ships by 2025, said Julie Higgins, Uniworld’s sustainability officer.

Hotels

Hospitality’s largest players have made progress on the food waste front in recent years, implementing everything from smaller plates at buffets to AI-powered technology, enabling properties to better plan food purchasing. Despite those efforts, waste has not been eliminated.

“Hotels are doing a lot at a procurement level and really optimizing their supply chain, or they’re finding ways to utilize more of a fruit or vegetable or meat,” said Chris O’Brien, CEO of Hungry Giant Waste Systems. “But there’s always going to be food waste. There are always going to be trimmings left or scraps from plates.”

Hungry Giant offers a solution for that final piece of the food waste puzzle. The company’s $20,000 bio-dehydrators have gained traction across a variety of industries,  including cruise, and are starting to make inroads into the hotel sphere, offering a practical alternative to on-site composting.

“Our view is that hotels and restaurants are not in the business of making compost for a living,” O’Brien said, adding that composting can be a complicated, as well as a potentially messy and smelly, endeavor.

Hungry Giant bio-dehydrators, the smallest of which has a capacity of 70 pounds and is comparable in size to a residential dishwasher, rapidly heat food waste, converting its moisture into steam, which then condenses into a clear liquid that is drained. The resulting dry organic matter, which is sterile and emits minimal odor, can be stored for long periods and used as fertilizer.

The Westin Verasa Napa runs food waste from its Michelin-starred La Toque Restaurant through a Hungry Giant machine. The resulting organic matter is used to enrich local gardens that supply produce for the restaurant. “It’s a closed-loop system,” O’Brien said. “Our hope is that this becomes as commonplace as a dishwasher in hotels.”

Unlike airlines, hotels have an easier time redistributing surplus food that hasn’t been touched.

Townsend Bailey, head of corporate responsibility for the Americas at IHG Hotels & Resorts, said that hotels are sometimes left with excess food unexpectedly, such as when the number of guests attending an event changes at the last minute and the meal is already prepared.

In these situations, IHG’s Crowne Plaza Atlanta Perimeter at Ravinia seeks to not only reduce food waste but address hunger. Last year the property partnered with Goodr, an organization that streamlines the logistics around collecting surplus food, from pickup to donation and linking with local nonprofits and other groups to get that food to those in need.

IHG area general manager Sharon Kilmartin said Goodr’s app enables the property to request a pickup of surplus food, see where it’s donated and view an analytics dashboard. Last year, the hotel diverted roughly 1,200 pounds of food waste from landfills via Goodr. The partnership is so successful that IHG recently expanded it to properties across the U.S.

“With Goodr, if [a surplus food] situation happens, we can simply order a pickup on the app, and they come immediately to collect the food,” Kilmartin said. “Within two hours, it’s being served to a community partner that needs it.”

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