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Until September 29, the International Day against Food Waste, the industry platform United Against Waste Austria is drawing attention to the issue of food waste prevention.
Commercial kitchens play a special role in food waste. For this reason, the City of Vienna presented awards at the beginning of the campaign week to businesses that take effective measures to prevent food from being thrown away.
Last year’s winners included the Breitenfurter Straße all-day elementary school, the TÜV-Center company restaurant in Liesing and the Tamariske-Sonnenhof care home in Donaustadt.
The kitchens of these institutions had the lowest rate of food thrown away in an Austria-wide comparison.
In Vienna, 65 canteen kitchens take part in the “United against waste” program. Through monitoring and targeted measures – such as improved menu planning and optimization of ordering processes, canteen kitchens have been able to reduce their food waste by almost 20 percent since 2018.
Simple measures can be taken to prevent food or leftovers from ending up in the bin: Some establishments let guests choose the portion size themselves—for example, with a red receipt for a larger portion and a green receipt for a smaller portion.
Austrian hospitals, care homes, schools, restaurants and hotels produce around 180,000 tons of food waste yearly, of which an estimated 134,000 tons could be avoided.
In Austrian canteen kitchens, the food that is thrown away accounts for a quarter of the food served on average.
Throwing away food is expensive: the value of the avoidable food waste that is generated in Austrian communal catering alone each year is equivalent to around 356 million euros.
Every day, tons of food are produced, stored, transported, processed and prepared at great expense of resources – a third of which does not end up in our stomachs but in the garbage bin.
Food waste is generated along the entire value chain: during production, in retail, in private households and also in out-of-home catering (canteen kitchens in hospitals, company restaurants, but also in restaurants and hotels).
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