Reducing food waste at home

Did you know only 25% of potatoes produced end up on our plate? 75% are actually lost throughout the food journey. And 4.4 million potatoes go to waste in UK home every. single. day. It’s crazy, right?

You might ask why we’re hitting you with a lot of potato-based facts. Well, 1-7 March is Food Waste Action Week, and we’re committed to not only reducing our food waste in the restaurant, but also to help you at home. And that starts with knowledge. Not only are we pretty rubbish when it comes to wasting potatoes, but we throw away the equivalent of 3.1 million glasses of milk and 20 million slices of bread every day in the UK.

For our part, we’ll be signing up to WRAP’s Guardians of Grub programme – starting by measuring our food waste, and then putting an action plan into play.

If you want to take up the challenge of reducing your food waste at home, Executive Chef Paul Beckley and Bar Manager Rose-Marie Tucker have given us some of their top tips. Plus, you can share your tips on social media and win some pretty great prizes – take up the Love Food Hate Waste challenge here.

Paul’s top tips to reduce food waste in the kitchen

Shop smart: have a shopping list and don’t deviate
Plan your meals ahead – try creating a weekly meal planner and base your shopping list on this
De-clutter your fridge and store cupboards regularly so that you can keep an eye on use-by dates
Learn to preserve on-the-turn fruit and veg – make them into chutneys, jams and pickles
Eat the skin of potatoes and carrots etc. They’re super nutritional, flavoursome and you’ll save on waste and prep time
Eat the season: eat food that’s in season (when it’s at its best) – plus it’ll help your carbon footprint too
Be careful of your portion sizes – don’t over-produce the volume of food your cooking – this saves waste, time and money
Freeze leftovers for another day – they’ll last for at least a month in the freezer, depending on what you’ve cooked
Use vegetable trimmings for stocks or soups
Add fruit and veg trimmings to a compost heap in your garden – or feed a wormery!

Rose’s top tips to reduce food waste behind the bar

We’ve been using aquafaba on the bar instead of egg white. Once the kitchen have used chickpeas, they give us the leftover liquid which we use our cocktails instead of egg white. The great thing is it has no flavour and makes the drinks vegan friendly – a win all round!
We also dehydrate any fruit that has been chopped at the end of the night to make garnishes instead of throwing it away.
We only use edible garnishes, so that nothing goes in the bin.
We’ll be speaking to our on-site florist about using spent coffee grounds as fertiliser for the plants around the hotel.

Let us know what your top tips to reduce food waste are on Twitter, Facebook and Instagram.