Food waste and portion control with Vollrath

Welcome to The Community Table, a digital hub where foodservice experts, equipment manufacturers, and business owners sit down with us to share restaurant industry insights. Each month, we will highlight everything from new business practices to old industry secrets with feedback from you, the people who know your industry best.

For our first blog, we chose to highlight a significant issue harming restaurants nationwide — food waste.

According to the USDA, America's restaurant industry loses $162 billion annually in food waste costs. In an industry with average profit margins of 3-5%, that is a staggering amount. In 2021, global food prices surged to their highest level in a decade, and market experts predict all food prices to increase an additional 7.1% in 2023.

The case could not be clearer — to survive in the foodservice industry, business owners must eliminate all possible food waste. How? With meticulous portion controls.

Portion controls ensure you know exactly how much food to buy, serve, and store to maximize your culinary investments. To learn more about proper portion controls and how to implement them, we sat down with Volrath, a commercial cooking and serving equipment manufacturer that specializes in portion control tools.

Food waste is about more than spoiling produce. It is also a matter of serving the correct portion sizes. So how do I know if I'm over-serving?

Vollrath: It's as simple as managing your exceptions. You can divide your costs per portion to determine the profit margins of each dish, but over-serving opens up a larger can of worms.

If a dish simply comes with a lot of food, is that waste? If we over-serve and the customer eats it all, is that waste? We can also apply this to over-cooking. If I make too much food and it can't all be served, that food is wasted. Portion accuracy helps solve this issue.

When it comes to over-serving specifically, if my portion sizes are too large and a customer doesn't eat it all, that plate comes back with food still on the plate. That is a portion I could have used for another plate. That's waste.

What helps kitchen staff consistently use proper-sized utensils when portioning out orders?

A big part of this comes down to training, but on our end, we try to make it easy with color coding.

Visually coding your portion tools promotes easy identification, even from a distance. Our handles are fully color-coded, as opposed to just a button or a smaller marking. From a supervisor's standpoint, you can see what portion sizes are used before, during, and after a dish is made.

For example, in our lineup, once you know that blue translates to a 2-ounce portion, it can be universally applied to our ladles, spoodles, dishers, etc.

What are some other advantages to visually coding your utensils?

Along with accurate portion control and consistency, it helps with food safety. By knowing which tools should have been used for what, you can know which are contaminated or safe.

It also breaks the language barrier. If you apply colors to different pictures of your dishes, people who don't speak the same language can quickly know which portion goes where.

Beyond food waste and unnecessary costs, what are some other disadvantages of over-portioning?

As we said before, consistency is important to both chefs and customers.

In large operations, if the chef had planned 400 2-ounce portions and someone on in the kitchen is over-portioning, you will run out of food before you reach the number of dishes you wanted to sell.

There are also healthcare concerns. If my dish is supposed to have only so much of a certain ingredient, what might that do to a diabetic?

And, of course, there is the flavor profile. If someone over portions capers in a dish, the flavor could be too powerful. That would also throw off the number of capers you need for future dishes.

How can restaurants better manage portion controls and food availability?

Every restaurant is different, but they all need processes in place. Follow the recipe, and don't let staff deviate. Calculate your yields with X amount of correct portions. Measure ingredients and dishes out with the right tools, record your measurements, and make you are managing your food inventory correctly.

Food waste and portion controls may go together like peas and carrots, but there are more than margins on the line. Each year, 34 million people experience food insecurity in the United States. By minimizing our waste and maximizing our inventory efficiency, we can trim the fat of the foodservice industry and turn a corner on food economics for everyone, both in and outside of your restaurant.