How to track food waste in a restaurant kitchen

To track food waste in a restaurant kitchen, separate it by where it happens, weigh it at the end of each service, and record the reason whenever a named item is thrown away, such as a returned dish or stock past its date. Then set the totals against covers and stock costs each week. WRAP's Guardians of Grub campaign sorts kitchen waste into four categories: spoilage, preparation, plate waste and other. The largest category tells you whether to look first at ordering, prep or portions.

WRAP's latest UK figures, published in July 2025 and based on 2021 data, put food waste from UK hospitality and food service at about 1.1 million tonnes a year. Around 800,000 tonnes of that was food that could have been eaten, worth £3.21 billion at 2021 prices. WRAP stresses that its estimates for this sector are modelled from the number and type of sites, on the assumption that waste per site has not changed since 2011, so they show the scale of the problem and say little about any one kitchen.

Why measure food waste instead of estimating it?

Estimates tend to follow what the team notices, which is usually the dramatic loss: a dropped tray or a fridge that failed overnight. Daily trim and the chips left on plates are easier to miss because they happen every service. When WRAP launched Guardians of Grub in 2019, it said that on average 21% of the sector's food waste came from spoilage, 45% from food preparation and 34% from customers' plates.

Your own split will differ, and it shows where to act. High spoilage usually means ordering, storage or stock rotation needs attention. Heavy preparation waste points to trim specifications, batch sizes and how far ahead you prep, while plate waste leads you to portion sizes, garnishes and side dishes that come back untouched.

How do you set up a food waste tracking system?

Keep the first version simple enough that a busy team will keep it going for a month.

• Put out labelled caddies for spoilage, preparation, plate waste and other where each kind of waste is created: the stores or walk-in, the prep benches and the clearing station.
• Weigh each caddy at the end of every service before it is emptied into the main food waste bin. Write down the date, the service, the category and the weight.
• Record the covers for the same service so you can work out waste per cover.
• Log named items separately when they carry a real cost, such as a returned main, a tray of desserts past its date or a cocktail made wrong. Note the product, the quantity, the reason and who recorded it.
• Agree a short list of reasons (over-production, expired, damaged, returned by guest, made wrong) so the log can be totalled.
• Review the figures weekly with the head chef. WRAP's guidance suggests you can start analysing once you have a couple of weeks or a month of data.

What should a food waste log record?

Weight tells you volume. Cost tells you what to fix first, because a kilo of beef fillet trim and a kilo of potato peelings are very different losses. Price named items at recipe cost, meaning the ingredient cost of the quantity thrown away. Keep complimentary dishes and discounts out of the waste log: they are commercial decisions and belong with your sales figures.

Recording who logged an item and when lets you see patterns by shift or station, which is useful for fixing prep lists and training. Keep the tone practical. A log that starts to feel like a disciplinary record soon stops being filled in.

How do you turn food waste figures into changes?

Work out waste per cover so busy and quiet weeks can be compared. Say a 60-seat restaurant serves 700 covers in a week and the caddies weigh 84kg in total. That is 120g of food waste per cover. If plate waste makes up 40kg of it, look at which dishes come back with food left on them before changing anything in the kitchen.

The usual responses follow the categories:

• Spoilage: order short-life produce in smaller quantities more often, set par levels from sales history, and date-label and rotate stock so the oldest is used first.
• Preparation: write trim specifications for proteins and vegetables, use good trim in staff food, stocks or specials, and size batches to the bookings and forecast for each service.
• Plate waste: compare portion sizes with what comes back, offer sides as a choice, and drop garnishes that are routinely left.

Change one or two things at a time and keep weighing, so you can see which change moved the figure.

What are the food waste rules for restaurants in England, Wales and Scotland?

In England, the Simpler Recycling rules for workplaces came into force on 31 March 2025. Workplaces, including cafes, restaurants, pubs, takeaways and hotels, must arrange for food waste to be collected separately from dry recyclables and general waste, however little food waste they produce. Micro-firms, meaning businesses with fewer than 10 full-time equivalent employees counted across the whole business rather than per site, have until 31 March 2027. The Environment Agency enforces the rules. The same guidance says cooking oil must never go down the drain: small amounts of fats, oils and grease can go in the food waste collection, and otherwise they should go to a used cooking oil collection.

In Wales, workplace recycling rules have applied since 6 April 2024. Premises producing 5kg or more of food waste in any seven-day period must present it separately for collection, and no food waste of any amount may go down a sink or drain into the sewer. In Scotland, SEPA says food businesses that consistently produce 5kg or more of food waste a week must present it for separate collection, unless they are in an area defined as rural.

A separate food waste collection makes tracking easier, since the caddies are already kept apart from general waste. This is general information: check the current guidance from gov.uk, the Welsh Government or SEPA, and confirm the arrangements with your waste collector.

How does Tiquo record wastage alongside stock?

Tiquo has a dedicated wastage workflow for losses you can name as a product. Staff record the product, quantity, reason and the staff member responsible, and can close the record straight away or keep an open wastage tab while more items are added during a shift. Saving deducts the applicable tracked stock, and if a saved quantity is changed later, Tiquo adjusts stock to match.

Standard reasons are managed in Settings > Reporting, with Other for losses that don't fit a preset, and a service area can require administrator approval before wastage is finalised. Wastage is switched on in the settings of a product-capable service area. Staff then record it from Orders > Wastage on the dashboard or from supported iOS and payment-terminal apps, so the entry can be made where the loss happens.

Because wastage uses the same products and stock as the POS, it sits alongside Tiquo's inventory management. Recipes record how much of each ingredient a dish uses, so a sale deducts those quantities, and our guide to restaurant inventory covers how to set them up. Sell-by dates flag stock that is close to expiry and mark stock past its date as unavailable for sale, which helps with spoilage, while low-stock thresholds with configurable alerts and stock locations support smaller, more frequent orders of short-life produce.

The caddy weights for prep and plate waste still come from the scales. The wastage workflow covers the itemised losses that carry a stock value, on the same platform as the POS, bookings and kitchen routing Tiquo provides for restaurants and bars.