Making the most continues! Are you interested in how to reduce food waste? Amazing! We want to help you achieve this impactful goal by implementing a few easy strategies to reduce food waste.
Here are FIVE simple ways that you can adopt to reduce food waste, starting today. Remember, hand washing is an ESSENTIAL habit before meals, after meals, touching parts of your body, and after the restroom. Biological pathogens are bugs, but would you prepare wholesome, healthy food after bugs crawled on your hands, would you?
One of the simplest ways to reduce food waste is to avoid buying too much. A complete fridge may look appealing, but trust me, it leads to a lot of food waste. Instead of dumping all the non-essentials in the refrigerator, you can stalk up your fridge with the essentials you need daily. Ensure that you take a couple of trips to the grocery store rather than one more extended trip as it’ll prevent hoarding up non-essentials, eventually helping you to reduce waste.
No. 2 – Plan Ahead
Making a list about what you’re going to cook may help you organize food usage as it’ll ensure that you consider all leftovers and ingredients you have on hand before purchasing anything just like that. Meal planning is an excellent way to reduce food waste. Also, it makes shopping more accessible and more efficient since you’re not stalking up unnecessary items. Unplanned shopping sprees often end up spending outside your budget and with more food than you will consume. Half of the food is wasted at home unknowingly as we barely consider some products within the expiration date and end up buying too much.
No. 3 – Organize the storage, refrigerated and dry storage.
A cluttered fridge leads to waste as foods that will expire soon get pushed back on the shelves, which tends to get overlooked when preparing upcoming meals. An organized fridge will also help you keep track of the eatables you have at home and items ready to be eaten. Keep the products that will expire soon at the front so that you can use them as an ingredient in your next meal. Declutter and consolidate your fridge by organizing all the produce, fruits, dairy, and meat in separate sections. It becomes easy for you to see the items to prevent repurchasing them. Ensure that you maintain the fridge’s proper temperature for optimum food storage.
Consider an excellent skill to know and practice, the method FIFO, which stands for “First in, First out” for the proper organization as it will ensure that you keep the products close to the expiration date at the front and one’s which were most recently purchased at the back. This method will ensure freshness and reduce waste.
Did you know that expiration dates “best if used by, freeze by, best by” are days from shelf-life studies on food quality? So use your home chef noggin’ when something is past expiration; you still have wholesome, nutritious, safe food opportunities. Organoleptically sensory practices are part of the home chef you already are. So, smell and taste.
For example, a bag of trail mix slips behind some cans, but you find it closest to the holiday; therefore, share excitement until it appears the product is past the “expiration date.” Then, the next step; hand washings, open, smell, taste, and evaluate. Finally, you have options to turn the nuts and dried fruit separately (sauce, pesto, protein, or vegetable crusts, eat it, or compost) to pair with meals.
No. 4 – Try Out Food Preservation Methods
Properly canning and storing food can extend the shelf life and avoid contamination. If you accidentally re-purchase the food, preservation can help prevent it from spoiling. One of the easy methods is to freeze the food. For example, one of the ways to deal with surplus apples is to cook them down to applesauce. The jarred applesauce and kept for a long time in the fridge. Cauliflower floret stems are a great vegetable to freeze as mise en place (prep, literally “things in place) for grain-free bowls or rice replacement.
You can also pickle anything, from onions to eggs, to store it in the long run. A food dehydrator can also help in preserving a wide variety of fruits, vegetables, and meats.
Control Point is a long-time fan of food preservation and teaches it in food safety courses. Consider resources materials from Universities to learn the VALUE of food safety. Safety is critical to OBTAIN and MAINTAIN quality using systematic practices such as HACCP. It’s one of the things that took humanity to space. Hazard Analysis Critical Control Point is the management system required when you launch your food preservation hustle like our students; “Vargo Brother Ferments pretty much anything you can think of.”
No. 5 Compost Kitchen Waste
When others see waste, trash, or byproduct, Control Point loves to show opportunities. All of the practices are nutritious and compost is very.
All food waste should be composted. It’s one of the easy and efficient ways to produce your own high-quality and low-cost fertilizers. If you have a compost heap, you can add the scraps like peels, stems, unusable bits of food, and leftovers which will help to reduce waste by turning the debris into nutrient-rich fertilizer. If you haven’t got one, you can simply place a bucket with a lid in a location close to the cutting board to directly add the scraps to the bin. It counts as a complement to your organic garden as it will help to turn scraps into nutrient-rich fertilizers, and if you don’t own a garden, still composting will be beneficial for you as it can be used for lawn and shrub beds as well as for indoor potted plants.
Return On Investments
Minor changes to our daily habits can contribute to making a huge difference. People must take steps to avoid the environmental impact, which can be done by preventing food waste. Reducing food waste will also help save more money. Hygiene is the most vital component to the best shelf life of a prepared food when the kitchen is sanitary.
Which method are you going to adopt to reduce food waste and handwashing songs do you sing? Tell us in the comments!
Aayushi is a content writer at F and B Recipes. When not writing, she can be found creating a List of Citrus Fruitsor coming up with creative Food Blog Names.
Control Point founder, Trevor J. Morones, is a classically culinary trained expert butcher. As a craft butcher, he understands first-hand the desire to focus on the craft and create the best product possible, making throngs of satisfied customers and fulfilling brand promises of quality, efficiency, and unique value.
As a Lead HACCP Instructor, GFSI auditor, and ANSI Instructor/Proctor, Trevor brings his brilliant engineering mind and spirit to craft training and solutions to minimize the amount of time spent with red tape and regulations, eliminating costly mistakes, fines while creating cultures of operational excellence.
In working with high-volume manufacturing facilities and highly acclaimed restaurants such as B&B Hospitality Group, Good Uncle, and The Cosmopolitan of Las Vegas, Trevor has perfected the balance between productivity and compliance. Control Point was created to guide Chefs, Restaurant Groups, and Food Manufacturers through their food safety concerns and processes with a high level of excellence.
Control Point is all about results. Trevor’s training and implementation practices have proven to increase company growth, domestically and internationally, by 66%. Trevor, holds positions on many committees critical to the support of food industry safety and excellence.
Many people, including our team, are on a waiting list for grocery pick up. Some of us are two weeks out from our next delivery. Acquiring vegetables with a long shelf life is a great way to get more mileage out of your pantry. Potatoes are an excellent choice for the Home Chef.
Standard Shelf life and Storage: Depending on what type and how they are stored, potatoes last about 3-5 weeks in the pantry. Each potato variety is unique. However, a good rule of thumb is to keep potatoes stored in a cool and dark location away from other fruits and vegetables.
Are you about to make your grocery list? We have ranked the types of potatoes based on versatility, availability, and sustainability:
Russet baking potatoes
Yukon gold or yellow
Red bliss
Sweet potatoes and yams (Note: These are similar to potatoes, but they yield a sweet flavor when cooked. Keep this in mind when determining if they can be swapped out in a meal)
Tip: You can eat a potato even when it has sprouted. Just cut the sprouts (aka eyes) out and eat the rest. Do not eat the sprouts as they can lead to a headache and nausea.
Check out these recipe links to meals featuring potatoes:
Scott Forgey, our partner and team member, covers Gross Margin. Trevor Morones dives into food safety to show the connection between the two. Revenue minus your COGS (cost of goods sold) equals your Gross Margin or “Market Basket”. Our usable product provides us with two platforms, Social and Financial responsibility. Bottom line, we are in business to make money but we must be aware of our impact in the market and society.
When choosing raw material suppliers we have a primary and secondary vendors. Do these vendors have the same or similar vision for social responsibility? Do these vendors meet the requirements of our approved supplier program? How can we work together to create safe food for our customers? This is where our prerequisite programs or “PRPs” start to connect with the business. Prerequisite programs are the foundation to our Food Safety Management System and our HACCP plan.
If there is not a sufficient market basket the business may not have the proper finances to provide ourselves with an income, support our preventative maintenance program, Sanitation program, our the resources needed to adequately train our staff. All of these, are PRPs that are apart of the foundation of our Food Safety Management System. A stronger Food Safety Management System allows for new business opportunities which creates a stronger gross margin (market basket).
Incase you missed the action, head to our Library to download the slide deck and catch the live recording.
