Kick Off Task Force Meetings

You've decided to create a Food Waste Management Task Force and identified the key players to get involved. Now what?

The following agenda outline and script can be used to introduce key leadership to your hotel’s food waste reduction project and each team member’s role in the initiative.

Sample Agenda

Meeting Goals

  • Introduce food waste reduction project goals and objectives
  • Review project tasks and immediate next steps
  • Review individual department responsibilities
  • Discuss how to implement food waste separation and measurement

Suggested Attendees and Pilot Project Role

Role Pilot Responsibilities
General Manager Sponsor and advocate participation of hotel staff
HR Director Deliver staff surveys, hold trainings, and develop project communication
Executive Chef Separate and track pre-service food waste
Catering Staff or F&B Director Encourage staff support of tracking activities
Head of Stewarding Separate and track post-service food waste
Sustainability Director
(if applicable)		 Program Support

 

Key Talking Points

Introduction

Our property will be implementing a food waste reduction initiative over the next 4 months with a goal of creating a food waste prevention culture at our property. The project will require weekly “weigh-ins” for a period of 4 months similar to the Weight Watchers model for weight loss to track our reductions in food waste over this period.

We will separate our food waste into 2-streams (or number desired by your property), pre-service and post-service, in order to track weekly bin counts for each stream. Once the separation and tracking system is running smoothly, our property will be implementing a series of waste prevention guiding principles to test their effectiveness at reducing food waste within our operations.

Separation

To capture pre-service and post-service waste counts, we will be installing two different colored bins – yellow for culinary staff waste and green for front-of-house waste (or the colors your property decides on). Management will be asking for counts of all bins in the kitchen areas by the end of this week and will be installing color-code program bins next week. Going forward, yellow bins will be used to collect spoilage and prep waste in storage areas and kitchens and green bins will be used to collect overproduction and plate waste from service areas.

  • The Executive Chef and/or the Executive Sous Chef will need to communicate with their staff that all kitchen food waste will now be placed into yellow bins.
  • Head of Serving/Catering and the Head of Stewarding will need to communicate with their staff that all food waste from the buffets, catering events, and guests’ plates should be placed in green bins.

Tracking

At the end of each work day, stewarding staff will tally up the number of full bins by bin size and report these numbers to the Data Manager, who will track them using a simple excel sheet or online data management tool, if available. Management is asking Head of Stewarding to identify a few select stewards to be responsible for this data recording task. These individuals should be put in contact with the Data Manager to determine the best way to manage and transfer data.

Communications

HR will also distribute project updates to staff twice a month to show the progress our property is making.

Next Step

Our immediate next steps and initial task is to develop a fully functional separation and tracking system to smoothly track our weekly counts.

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