Sustainable Practices in Restaurant Chains: How to Reduce Your Environmental Footprint
- September 16, 2024
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Nouhad Es-Said
In an increasingly eco-conscious world, restaurant chains around the globe are under mounting pressure to adopt sustainable practices that reduce their environmental footprint. Although implementing these practices across multiple locations may present a significant challenge at first, the advantages to be gained from making such a move cannot be ignored. From sustainable food sourcing to effective waste energy management, the path to restaurant sustainability has many different aspects that restaurant leaders must analyze and consider to ensure a future that is much more ecologically aware.
Table of Contents
- Sustainable Food Sourcing.
- Waste Management Strategies.
- Energy Efficiency and Conservation.
- Measuring and Reporting Sustainability Efforts.
- Supy’s Role in Integrating Sustainable Practices in Multi-Chain Restaurants.
- Conclusion.
- About Supy.
Consider the example of a chain of fast-food restaurants with locations dotted all across the country. After several failed attempts at minimizing their waste footprint, the restaurant’s owners quickly wizened up to the potential of restaurant management software. They decided to invest in one software that let them track their sources of food waste in real time.
By analyzing the data and running the numbers, the owners soon realized they were way over-ordering on certain perishable items. By adjusting its orders based on demand forecasts generated by the app, the company could bring its waste levels way under control, ultimately reducing its carbon footprint by a significant measure.
By prioritizing restaurant sustainability, multi-location restaurants like those mentioned above can lead the charge in creating a greener future, while also reaping the benefits of increased customer loyalty and cost savings! Intrigued? Learn how to do it yourself for your restaurant business below!
1. Sustainable Food Sourcing
Finding ways to sustainably source your food is arguably one of the most important ways to reduce the environmental footprint of your restaurant chain. As food sourcing is the bread and butter of any restaurant business, keeping this process in check can do wonders for your sustainability goals.
By following modern ethical and sustainable sourcing practices, you can make sure you’re feeding your customers with ingredients that cause minimum harm to the environment. Not only will this help ecologically, such as by reducing carbon emissions, preserving biodiversity, and conserving water, but will also give you a clear conscience and boost company morale.
Sustainable methods of food sourcing are also designed to support fair labor practices and maintain the health of crucial ecosystems. By committing to these practices, restaurant chains can make a significant positive impact on the world around them, all while aligning with growing consumer demand!
Leveraging Software for Sustainable Sourcing
Many new restaurant management software allows restaurants to effectively track and manage their suppliers. Such programs can provide real-time data on your supplier’s track record on things like:
· The carbon footprint of their offered products,
· Adherence to ethical standards, and
· The sustainability of their packaging materials
Some restaurant management programs even come with features like supplier management modules and automated compliance checks that allow owners and managers to standardize these sustainable practices across each of their locations. With these capabilities, it’s easier than ever for restaurant chains to ensure they’re getting their stock from a reliable and ethical source.
2. Waste Management Strategies
Large multi-chain restaurants are notorious for the significant amounts of food waste they produce on a daily, regular basis. This is a major contribution to the pollution of the environment, with some of the top ways including:
·Food waste,
Heaps of uneaten or spoiled food are being discarded every single day. This waste often ends up in landfills, where it slowly decomposes and releases methane in the process. This is a potent greenhouse gas that can have significant detrimental impacts on the environment.
·Packaging waste
This includes the adoption of single-use plastics and non-recyclable materials which are also discarded on a regular basis, by both customers and the restaurant business. This adds to the global plastic pollution crisis where non-biodegradable materials wind up in oceans, lakes, and ponds. Opt for biodegradable, sustainable packaging, which can be reused and recycled. This is especially important when it comes to takeout and delivery, where packaging often creates the most waste.
·Operational wastes
A restaurant can be subject to operational wastes as well from things like inefficient energy use, wasted water, and excess inventory also all contribute to a restaurant’s overall environmental footprint. Remember, less is more, so it is an ideal practice to only consume as much as you need to avoid operational wastage.
Using Technology to Minimize Waste
You’d be surprised by what modern technology can do to reduce food waste across multi-location restaurant chains. Many of these high-tech systems allow you to track your inventory in real-time, helping to monitor stock levels and minimize over-ordering, which directly reduces food waste. By enabling the predictive analytics feature, many restaurant leaders can make an educated estimate for their next round of supply purchases. Since such forecasts are based on each location’s own sales patterns, installing restaurant management software can be a surprisingly accurate way to prevent excess food from being prepared and discarded.
One example of a restaurant location that managed to significantly manage its waste through technological means is Pinza!. With 13 branches across the UAE, this dark pizza kitchen was struggling with large amounts of variance due to errors from manual data entry. Soon Supy came to the rescue, bringing Pinza! fully on board with its central data management system. With this new instant access to real-time interactive dashboards, it was now a lot simpler to spot any discrepancies.
“We’ve reduced waste, improved variance, and increased profits in record time. Incredible!” said an overjoyed Tamer Elkhayat, managing partner at the company.
3. Energy Efficiency and Conservation
Another major polluter for restaurants is their massive energy consumption. The problem is only multiplied manifold when large-scale operations enter the picture since this naturally leads to higher energy demands: from kitchen equipment to HVAC systems and lighting. This constant use of electricity has majorly contributed to rising levels of greenhouse gas emissions, arguably making energy efficiency the most critical aspect of sustainability for large-scale restaurants to focus on.
By reducing energy consumption, all your locations can not only lower their carbon footprint; they can also help you save money by lowering your utility costs! But it’s not like we can all just turn off our lights, so what are we to do instead? Installing energy-efficient appliances and optimizing your heating and cooling systems are all great ways to start your business on the journey toward cleaner and more efficient sources of energy.
Optimizing Your Restaurant’s Energy Use with Restaurant Management Software
That’s right, restaurant management software has come to rescue you once again! Many of the newer apps on the market can be powerful tools in the journey toward energy optimization across multiple locations. Several of these systems often include features that monitor your restaurant’s energy consumption in real time, allowing managers to identify where the inefficiency is coming from and target new areas for improvement.
For example, it’s not unheard of to integrate smart thermostats with such kinds of software to automatically adjust your restaurant’s temperature. Restaurant owners and managers can even set pre-programmed commands into the system based on the restaurant’s occupancy levels to further automate the process.
Besides this, many modern restaurant management software can provide detailed energy reports to help you track your progress in energy conservation. By leveraging these advanced tools, multi-location restaurants can more effectively manage their energy consumption, contributing to both sustainability and cost savings.
An example of one company that improved its efficiency through restaurant management software is Burger28! This beloved Emirati burger chain used to have a serious issue with maintaining operational excellence across its multiple locations. The owner, Alex Debarre, found it difficult to monitor key metrics across his inventories while also helping his staff make data-driven decisions.
With Supy’s help, Burger28 successfully centralized all of its data, eliminating loads and loads of paperwork. With Supy’s centralized data management tool, the team could now track their inventory, variance, and stock data all under one roof—and the results were clear! Alex is now happy to report a 6% profitability increase, and a hundred hours of manual labor saved every month, all with the help of Supy!
4. Measuring and Reporting Sustainability Efforts
Finally, tracking your sustainability metrics is a crucial part of any restaurant chain’s efforts to reduce its environmental footprint. Some of the key metrics that such chains should monitor include their weekly and monthly energy consumption, water usage, levels of waste production, and food-sourcing practices. By keeping an eye on these four areas, you can get quite a clear picture of a restaurant’s environmental impact, while also bringing light to new areas that may need improvement. For instance, monitoring your energy usage for a few months may reveal what freezers in your storage room are sucking up the most electricity and could potentially be replaced by a more energy-efficient model.
And the results of such regular reporting speak for themselves. Such levels of honesty and transparency have a way of building trust with one’s customers and stakeholders, by showing a proven commitment to eco-friendly practices. Tracking reports also help restaurant owners and managers set realistic goals for future sustainability efforts. By reviewing these metrics on a regular basis, restaurants around the world can make more data-driven decisions that lead to improved operational efficiencies.
How Restaurant Management Software Supports Measurement
Many modern software solutions come equipped with new ways to monitor our various sustainability metrics in real time. For example, they can track energy and water usage, manage waste disposal records, and evaluate the sustainability of food suppliers.
Several solutions can even be integrated with other systems, such as inventory and financial management tools, to allow for comprehensive levels of sustainability reporting you can only dream of! This integration provides a holistic view of a restaurant’s operations, enabling the creation of detailed reports that highlight successes and areas needing attention. By leveraging these software capabilities, restaurant chains can streamline their sustainability efforts, ensure accurate reporting, and ultimately achieve their environmental goals.
An example of one client that decided to hop onto the reporting and analytics train is Grit Hospitality, the brains behind some of the UAE’s favorite brands: Tahini, WiseGuys, and Moonshine!
With three booming brands under its name that all offered different kinds of cuisines, it was getting very hard for Riad Abou Lteif, the restaurant’s partner & executive chef, to keep things on track. All three of the company’s establishments were surprisingly running on an outdated pen-and-paper model and inefficient method of Excel spreadsheet record keeping, both of which were riddled with human error and hidden discrepancies.
“Supy increased our bottom line by digitizing our tasks, providing actionable insights, and streamlining our operations across all brands under management,” said Riad. “The built-in performance dashboards helped us investigate discrepancies that were hiding in plain sight!”
5. Supy's Role in Integrating Sustainable Practices in Multi-Chain Restaurants
Supy offers several comprehensive services designed to help you in your journey toward sustainable multi-chain restaurant management. Here’s how Supy is designed to help:
- Identify and Address Sources of High-Waste: It can be difficult to identify where our waste comes from during restaurant operations. Are there too many expiring items? Or are ingredients getting lost during the preparation process? With solid stats at hand, Supy makes it easier to train your team and create profitable items for your menu.
- Identify Your Top Suppliers and Build Business Relationships: One underestimated but vital part of building a restaurant business is developing relationships! Supy makes it easy to track how each of your suppliers treats you. Is one giving you a higher discount than another? Now you can check to see which suppliers are increasing their prices or throwing you a freebie from time to time to find the best supplier worth your money!
- Making Data-Informed Decisions: Supy’s interactive and mobile-friendly restaurant dashboards are a great tool for owners and managers trying to cover all of their back-of-house operations. With the Restaurant Analytics feature, Supy makes it a breeze to check out your procurement, inventory, and sales stats at a single glance!
- Create Categorized Purchase Orders: Take the hassle out of ordering ingredients for your team by collecting items sourced by different suppliers under their categories. If you find yourself regularly sourcing items from the same supplier, Supy will even let you set them as a preferred supplier to accelerate the purchasing process! How’s that for building a smoother supply chain?
6. Conclusion
It’s true, in the end, that sustainability has become a cornerstone of the modern restaurant industry, particularly for multiple restaurant locations that are striving to minimize their environmental impact. By implementing sustainable practices in food sourcing, waste management, and energy use, restaurants can significantly reduce their carbon footprint and greenhouse gas emissions while also appealing to a growing number of environmentally conscious consumers.
For restaurant chains across the world, there’s no doubt that the time to embrace sustainability is now. By adopting the kinds of key sustainability practices that have been outlined above, you not only contribute to a greener future for our children but also set yourself up to rub shoulders with other sustainable leaders in the industry!
Ready to take the next step? Subscribe to Supy’s newsletter for the latest insights into the hospitality sector, or book a free demo to see how our software can help you achieve your sustainability goals today! You could even head on over to the Xenia app for other ideas on how to improve your business!
7. About Supy
Supy is the best restaurant management software platform tailored for multi-branch restaurants and franchises. With unbeatable features like real-time inventory tracking, smart procurement systems, and advanced analytics, Supy helps restaurants manage their various demands effectively. Whether centrally adjusting stock levels or optimizing supply chain relationships, Supy provides the tools restaurants need to thrive in a dynamic industry.
For the latest expert insights, download Supy’s ebook: The Ultimate Guide to Reducing Food Costs in Multi-Branch & Enterprise Restaurants.
Ready to find out more? Schedule a demo with Supy today and take the first step towards a streamlined, profitable future.
