Today I want to talk about putting sustainable policies in place within your business.

You have to first of all decide what you want to do, it might be that you want to concentrate on your power usage, your electric. It’s an easy one to do, but to do that you need to probably get a champion within your staff, you can’t do it on your own and you’ve got to take your staff along with you.

So appoint somebody who’s going to be in charge, you need to monitor what you’re doing, look at different ways to do things – it doesn’t have to be difficult, there are plenty of free resources on the internet, there are plenty of free pointers, but you need to get your staff involved.

Get them thinking.

At home they probably do all of this, they’re probably used to turning lights off and not using lights and then changing their bulbs to LEDs etc. But because they don’t pay the bill, they are more likely to forget what they’re doing when they are on your premises, when they are at work.

Appoint a champion

Have regular staff meetings

Tell them the progress you’re making

It’s the same with food waste.

You can get food waste with several areas, there could be the food waste due to making the product, your prep, your veg trimmings, your meat trimmings.

You need to need to set aside a week, where you’re measuring all that. You want to measure the amount that you are wasting through trimmings and veg trimmings, we want to reduce them.

You want to measure the amount that you’re getting through food spoilage, where things have gone off in storage.

And you also want to measure what is coming back from the plates – so it’s stuff you’ve sent out to the restaurant, stuff you put on the buffet, stuff you’ve send out to functions, that at the end of the night hasn’t been used by customers.

Why is it important?

You need to be able to measure it and also add a factor in that what you think it costs to produce it, to buy it in and to get rid of it, so you can come up with a financial figure, then you can use that again with a champion member of staff, to look at ways of reducing it.

As I’ve said before, can you reuse that in your menu?

Can you jig your menu to use stuff that’s come back?

Classic example I’ve used before is can you use what’s left on Sunday Carvery on a Monday for chili’s, for stews, or for the curry club?

Currys on a Monday night are a classic way of using stuff left from the weekend.

It’s great, it will help your bottom line, it will help you be sustainable, it’ll help the planet.