Save money by honoring your food and reducing your waste

01 Jun Save money by honoring your food and reducing your waste

The pressure is on for all of us to save money these days, especially when it comes to recurring expenses like groceries. I’ll let you in on a secret that has helped Beyond Green Partners: Buy and use only as much as you need.

How do you know how much is enough? Pay attention to how much food you throw away each week. Then, buy less.

Simple is best

Another significant way you can cut waste is to simplify your meals. To be clear, this doesn’t mean sacrificing quality and flavor: You can make multiple, fabulous meals with just four or five ingredients.

Restaurant culture has given us the wrong idea when it comes to how much we think we need, pushing endless menu options that ultimately drive waste. We simply don’t require huge menus with so many choices. We don’t need huge portions that we can’t finish, and we don’t need to throw ingredients out every week in order to make sure we have enough.

What we do need to do is honor our food. Buy only what you need and use it all. You can save so much money this way while still eating well.

Walking the walk

This philosophy guides our business model, and it has also kept us afloat during these rocky economic times. As we operate on just a fraction of our business, we’re able to keep our company alive because we’ve been nimble and lean since the get-go. The approach that we use to save our clients significant amounts of money is the same approach we are using to survive.

Here’s a peek into how we have made this work: Our cooks have become razor sharp in how they portion out ingredients, religiously using scales to make sure that not one drop of sauce or crumb of flour goes to waste.

We have helped dozens of clients to work this way. We also help them pare down their menus to only a few entrees, which, by the way, is the ideal number for any restaurant. We use minimal ingredients to create simple, delicious dishes, and we don’t have thousands of dollars of unused inventory sitting on our shelves.

We use production schedules to make sure that we work as efficiently as possible, because, as you know, time is money. These schedules help us stay on-task and accountable to each other, which helps us reduce labor costs and build teamwork.

Honoring our food, reducing our waste and simplifying our meals can have a huge impact not just on our budgets, but the environment as a whole. Now is a great time to get started.