How to Tackle Food Waste Using Your Food Delivery Performance Insights

According to the UN, a third of all food produced is wasted. Whether this seemingly impossible estimation is accurate, we’d probably all agree that reducing food waste is a noble goal. 

While restaurants aren’t to blame, the exploding food delivery industry contributes a hefty share. In the last two years, the industry has grown exponentially into a $270 billion behemoth, benefiting from draconian lockdown measures and forced closures of private businesses.

There’s a strong incentive to reduce food waste for restaurants wanting to do their part. Not only will your efforts save you money in the recovery of wasted stock, better inventory control, and streamlined online ordering, but they will undoubtedly boost efficiency and bump your bottom line. 

But where do you start on such an ambitious goal? Our suggestion is to use your food delivery data. The numbers contain a wealth of insights. Key trends, stats, and figures hidden in your customer data could save you money while aiding the global effort to waste less food.

The first step is to examine the causes of food delivery waste. Then, we can tackle each, using hard data to control food production and online ordering and eliminate unnecessary waste. 

What Are the Causes of Food Delivery Waste?

A study of takeaways conducted by JustEat and The Sustainable Restaurant Association found that food waste generated in takeaway outlets increased from £111 to £148 per restaurant per week during the UK lockdown. Nearly half the restaurants reported they throw food waste in the trash. 

The rise was reportedly due to unpredictable ordering patterns during unprecedented circumstances. Restaurants' most common reason for throwing away food is overproduction.

These findings tell us that food waste is a huge problem, but they also indicate that it can be reduced by having a clearer idea of demand and better data on ordering preferences.

But it’s not just restaurants that throw good food away. The study also found that households throw away nearly one-tenth of the food ordered.One-quarter of consumers said that more than half the time they ordered a takeaway, they had leftovers that would be wasted.

Overordering is another challenge that restaurants can help address from their side, even if they can’t influence a customer’s behavior once the food has left the restaurant.

Key Food Delivery Metrics to Track

• Order Accuracy – Reducing mistakes is essential in reducing food waste

• Percentage On-time Delivery – Delayed deliveries lead to cold, soggy food, customer complaints, and food in the trash

• Average Time Per Delivery – This is also crucial in ensuring food arrives in the right condition

• Order Volume – Tracking order volume by category helps you make better predictions for purchasing and production

• Online Ratings – Keep track of customer satisfaction to avoid unwanted meals being thrown away

How Can Restaurants Use Food Delivery Insights to Reduce Food Waste? The above survey results suggest two areas where restaurants can reduce food waste. First, use ordering insights should be used to gauge demand to control stock levels and not overproduce meals. Second, use ordering insights to optimize your menus and ordering systems to encourage customers to order the right amount of food. 

Reducing Waste At The Source

The restaurant itself is the most essential place in which restaurants want to reduce food waste. This means strictly controlling inventory, ordering, recipe management, and costing. So, how can insights from your delivery performance help you tackle food waste?

Accurate Inventory Management

Managing inventory in a restaurant is notoriously tricky. Fresh, frozen, and dry ingredients have different storage needs and expiration limits. Food waste can skyrocket if your stock is not properly managed before an order is made. 

The key to ordering the right stock for a given service is accurately forecasting the day’s demand. This is not easy, but you can look at past performance at similar times to estimate how much stock you need to order and how much food you need to produce. 

The good news is that you can get deep insights into the data when you use online ordering and digital platforms for your delivery orders. As long as you have a streamlined tech system, where the ordering system, delivery partners, and other tech communicate in the same language, you can easily generate reports and forecasts to make your predictions as accurate as possible. 

A system like Deliverect takes in all your ordering data from different delivery platforms to give you clear insights in one dashboard. With a few clicks, you can generate sales reports comparing different channels and periods to show a service's demand clearly.

Limit Ordering Mistakes

Imagine a busy Friday night at a modern restaurant. Dine-in customers and multiple delivery tablets send orders thick and fast. The front-of-house staff rushes around, taking drink orders while managing multiple tablets. You can see how an order can be missed or punched in wrongly. 

isThethrown The kitchen team makes the order, which could be for delivery or dine-in. It gets sent out and flagged as wrong or incomplete. That food has to be remade, the customer compensated, and the food is in the trash. not to mention the time and money wasted over the error…

One of the simplest ways to avoid food waste is to avoid silly mistakes. Use your ordering data to determine how many orders must be remade, then optimize your system to limit these mistakes. 

Streamlining your ordering process can reduce mistakes to a bare minimum.

Run Promos to Shift Stock

When you are on top of your ordering data, you will know your peak times and slower periods. You can use this information to create promotions that encourage people to order outside peak times. This will help you avoid mistakes at peak times and reduce waste by preventing stock from going out of date at slower times.

With real-time menu management tools, you can even run promotions anytime to shift items that must be sold that day.

Say you have a dine-in pre-order table, cancel it, and have spare stock that needs to be eaten. You can quickly add a special to your delivery menu to sell the food that would otherwise go to waste.

Deliverect’s menu management tools allow you to quickly add a promo, match menus to stock availability, make changes to your menu on one screen, and then push it out to all your delivery partners with one click, rather than manually updating menus on several different platforms.

Reducing Food Waste at Home

While reducing food waste in restaurants has multiple business benefits, there is also a massive problem with food waste at home. An estimated 10% of all food ordered goes to waste.

Restaurants can take measures to decrease the likelihood that their food will be in the trash. While these measures won’t directly improve business, there is an argument that customers who order the right amount of food, receive accurate orders, and don’t throw any away are more likely to post positive reviews and become regulars. After all, no one wants to throw away good food.

Here’s how you can use your delivery insights to reduce food waste in the home.

Control Portion Size

It isn’t easy to calculate how much food your customers throw away without conducting a survey, but you can use your delivery data to determine the average order size and frequency.

Keeping portions under control will help your customers avoid overordering and reduce waste at home. It will also benefit the business by lowering food costs.

Clear Menu Descriptions

25% of respondents said they had leftovers in the trash more than half the time they ordered a takeaway. This was most commonly caused by overordering.

Restaurants can help their customers order the right amount of food by making portions appropriate and indicating the size of each dish on the menu. Images and descriptions that show customers what to expect from a dish will also help them order the right amount of food.

Simple descriptions and serving guidance can help customers order the right amount of food. Again, your delivery data can help you determine the average order size and trends. For example, do customers who order more food tend to order regularly, or do the regulars order small orders more frequently?

Analyzing trends like these can help you tailor your menu to your best customers while assisting them order the appropriate amount of food for them.

Keep Up With Key Metrics for Future Success

Food waste from food delivery is a huge problem. But as we have seen, there are many ways to tackle it, both in the restaurant and after the food has left the kitchen. 

Managing your food delivery metrics can help reduce food waste. However, it can also benefit your business in many ways, from better inventory and production control to streamlined online ordering and a better customer experience.

To help your restaurant achieve this win-win-win situation, Deliverect Restaurants developed a reporting and insights platform that complements its online ordering management system and menu management tools. The system shares all ordering data from your delivery partners to give you the best insights into your delivery performance.

What you choose to do with the data is up to you. But reducing food waste while making your operations more efficient is a great place to start!