Savour Food Programme develops new e-tool for Irish food service businesses

The e-tool is now available!

This is a free online tool for food service businesses. It’s all about supporting the industry to prevent and reduce food waste. As business models change and extra pressure is put on the bottom line, for food service, now might be a good time to establish new waste management systems to cut costs.

As part of the Savour Kilkenny Festival, which for 2020 has moved online, the e-tool will be launched this week. Through this Savour Food Programme, Irish food businesses can avail of free consultancy, including site visits and upcoming webinars focused on saving money by preventing and reducing food waste.

Here’s a snapshot of the e-tool and what it provides:

Advice from the kitchen

This section features advice on how to best manage and prevent food waste from industry experts who are already active practitioners. Find out what some of Ireland’s most respected industry professionals have to say about food waste, including: Darina Allen of Ballymaloe Cookery School, Pat Ferriter of Ferrit & Lee Restaurant, Eunice Power of Eunice Power Catering, JB Dubois of Grow HQ, Michael Lennon of Westport Woods Hotel and Victor Murphy of O’ Mahony’s Watergrasshill.

The Cost of Food Waste

Through use of this section, the user business will (a) identify the true cost of food waste generated by their business (b) obtain a food waste benchmark which can be compared against national standards for good practice and (c) identify the cost saving that could be achieved by reducing food waste to good practice standards.

Bins: The Basics

This section prompts users to visually asses their waste management systems and answer questions on waste management activities in their business focusing on waste segregation, training and awareness, and food waste management.

The Quick Fixes

This section outlines simple and low-cost waste food waste prevention actions which businesses can choose to undertake straight away. There is an option for businesses to select specific actions that they will apply and these will then be provided to them in a downloadable action plan.

Please circulate details of this free resource for food service with anyone who you think would be interested in it. There is now a twitter account at @savourfood_ie. Follow us for details of upcoming events.

Thank you to the industry professionals who are featured in the e-tool and thanks to the Department of Agriculture, Food and the Marine for the funding which makes this initiative possible.