The weekend brunch at Evald Brasserie & Café in Silkeborg used to generate 10-12 kg of food waste every week. This has significantly decreased since the restaurant revised its brunch concept.
According to statistics from the Ministry of Environment and Food in Denmark, professional kitchens waste approximately 60, 000 tonnes of food annually, 29,000 tonnes of which originates from restaurants and hotels. The restaurant and hotel industry has a responsibility to reduce that figure.
“The more we work with CSR, the more we recognize that we can make a significant impact by making very small adjustments. It is about changing habits,” says Jacob Niebuhr, Evald Brasserie & Café’s director and owner.
One of the changes Evald Brasserie & Café is making is to phase out the brunch buffet, which, until January 2016, resulted in more than half a tonne of food going directly into the bin.
In 2018, the restaurant still offers a weekend brunch, but the meal now centres around the table rather than a buffet. Guests are given the opportunity to get a sharing menu with continuous “top-ups” if they have the appetite for it. In this way, the guests get the same advantages as with a buffet, but the food waste is significantly reduced.
During the transition, the restaurant and especially the kitchen has changed its approach to food waste. They now try creatively to make sure that they use as much as possible of the individual food items. The ends of tomatoes are turned into purées, the stalks from herbs are used in the making of herbal oils, the bellies and tails of fish are used in fish patties, and so forth.
“We thought that we were pretty good at not wasting our raw ingredients. After working more intensely with this over the past year, we have even less waste and at the same time we have managed to improve our food cost percentage,” says Jon Horskjær, Kitchen Manager at Evald.
Evald Brasserie & Café is a part of REGA, a new industrywide initiative that works purposefully and ambitiously with corporate social responsibility. By participating in REGA, Evald Brasserie & Café commits to working systematically to prevent adverse impacts on human rights, including those of employees, guests, and the general public, to reducing the adverse impacts on the environment and to sharpening the focus on anti-corruption.
