Food Wastage
We are aware that many shops are keen to stock local produce but are worried about high levels of wastage. Does anyone have any tips they can share on managing this?
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We are aware that many shops are keen to stock local produce but are worried about high levels of wastage. Does anyone have any tips they can share on managing this?
On the general subject of food waste there is an excellent website called www.lovefoodhatewaste.com with lots of inspiring recipes for using up food and leftovers and there is also http://www.wasteawarelovefood.org.uk/ (meals made from leftovers can often taste scrummy!)
Hi - I am with Charlotte on this one - at our shop in Slaithwaite, we actively encourage customers to buy less than beautiful fruit and veg - yes we reduce the price and make a feature of the fact that today's bargains include 'soup bags' or 'fruit salad bags'. We use small chalkboards for pricing and these also act as message boards reminding customers that mushrooms cooked in butter and garlic taste just as great even if they are a little bashed, or that honey roasted swede and beetroot can be just as gorgeous if made with slightly soft veg !
We sell fruit that is going soft as 'juicing fruit', carrots that are wobbly as 'donkey carrots' - and generally they sell.
We find that we waste far less local food than the fruit and veg bought from the wholesale market - local food tends not to have sat in a cold store for weeks, or be wrapped in polythene - both of which do not help maintain quality and seem to actually encourage mould and rot. Even more reason for going local where you can !
Soup & Bread Pudding
With some of the main fruit and vegetables products that are nearing their sell by date we withdraw them from the shelves and make them into soup. If making for instance a parsnip and apple soup and we did not have enough apples to obtain the right balance of ingredients we would use some apples that had not yet reached their sell by date, otherwise waiting for the correct amount of ingredients combination could take some time.
Once made we sell soup in our small café, heated, along with a chunk of bread or sold in a takeaway coffee cup, hot or cold. Numerous takeaway customers buy other products while waiting for their soup.
Other soups we currently make are spicy vegetable, carrot and coriander, and pea and ham for the latter we do raid the freezer for a packet of peas and small off cuts of ham from our deli counter.
One other product we have started to sell is bread pudding. Now we all have some stale bread at some point during the week, secondly we find that a high percentage of our volunteers buy a slice now and again.
Mike
The main thing to manage your "waste" is to keep accurate records - what you bought, what you sold, what you marked down and what you threw away. I know this sounds like a pain, but it only has to be for key lines and doesn't have to be fancy, just a handwritten book. Over time, you should start to notice a pattern, but you will probably need to keep a record of weather and school holidays too. The records will be particularly useful next year, when you can look back at what you sold this year, especially in relation to bank holidays, school holidays etc.
Also, you should reduce anything that doesn't look fresh sooner rather than later - "little and early" - is the rule, there will always be someone looking for a bargain, even it its just a little saving. Keep the reduced items seperate from the fresh- so the customer has a choice, but they aren't mixed up together. Its important to always make sure that you have full availability of fresh stock of key lines (subject to seasonality). If you are trying to build sales of local fresh foods, customers need to know that they will always be able to get something and, over time, should start to purchase more. The final thing is to make sure that you build in an allowance for waste in to your retail price, so that, overall, you are not losing money.