Sustainability is a vital part of running a restaurant. Many restauranteurs follow these helpful tips for creating an eco-friendly menu for their guests.
There are many advantages to creating an eco-friendly restaurant. Going green can send a powerful message to your potential customers—and, after a few choice investments, it can often result in the restaurant saving money in the long run.
One great way to go green is to create a sustainable restaurant menu. Sustainable menus creatively use the same ingredients for multiple dishes instead of focusing on offering a higher number of food items. Keep reading to learn more about how you can create a more sustainable dining experience for your restaurant guests.
Redesign Your Menu
One of the most significant steps you can take when planning your menu is deciding what to include. A sustainable menu doesn’t necessarily need to be smaller, but it should utilize all your ingredients in multiple ways. Many restaurants may serve liver and onions, but how many other dishes on the menu use that that same liver and batch of onions? You can cut down on inventory and delivery costs by offering multiple menu items that use the same ingredients.
Local Supply Chain
Buying your ingredients from local sources also helps to create a sustainable restaurant menu. Getting produce from nearby sources reduces the length of the food supply chain between the produce’s origin and its destination—and increases the revenue of the local small businesses that provide the food. This farm-to-table approach to menu-building is very popular with restaurant owners and their guests—making it an ideal, sustainable choice for any restauranteur to consider.
Reduce Food Waste
Many restaurants throw out a lot of food. It would be beneficial for you to carefully examine which and how many foods go to waste by the end of the night. Closely monitoring the shelf life of your ingredients—and paying closer attention to what goes into the garbage—will allow you to determine how large your produce order really needs to be and what you can possibly reutilize. For instance, if you find yourself regularly throwing out stale bread, consider reutilizing it to make croutons for your salads.
