Food is wasted or thrown out in huge quantities at restaurants around the nation daily, as you can undoubtedly understand.
That bit of chicken someone left on the plate because they were too full, or that massive stack of pancakes that the children couldn’t finish.
Or how about the dish that was asked to be sent back since it didn’t delight the customer? —it's all going to be thrown out.
Once more, most of this food is wasted and ends up in a landfill.
A recent study found that restaurants squander half a pound of food every time a client orders, in addition to food waste in the kitchen.
Only a small portion of the 92 billion pounds of food that are wasted annually—roughly 51.7%—are recycled or donated, with the food sector being the primary source of food waste.
This level of food waste is undoubtedly a serious issue, given there are more than 44 million food-poor people in our nation.
Top 8 Food Waste Management Software for Restaurants
1. Xenia - The Best Software To Manage Food Waste At Restaurants
Surprisingly, many businesses lose more money on food waste than they make through sales.
Xenia's automated food waste tracking system allows you to pinpoint where and why such waste happens.
As part of our comprehensive hospitality management, our food waste management software provides detailed insights.
F&B businesses can track waste across operations and units to proactively reduce expenses and increase profitability.
By combining these powerful features like comprehensive checklists, AI-powered SOP writer, and temperature probes, users get comprehensive control over your operations, including inventory control, food storage, and food waste management.
The seamless flow of data from our software provides a complete 360° kitchen management solution.
With a robust waste management solution like Xenia, businesses can cut down on the back-and-forth guesswork and help teams focus on what matters—serving great food while saving money and resources.
Why use Xenia for food waste management?
- Temperature Monitoring & Alerts: The integration of temperature monitoring wireless sensors ensures food safety and minimizes loss due to improper storage conditions, with real-time alerts to fix issues before they become costly.
- Waste Prevention Checklists: Xenia’s comprehensive library of ready-made templates allows users to employ a solid waste management checklist to ensure proper trash management, sorting, and disposal. It helps establish whether the organization's waste management standards are appropriately enforced and followed.
- Detailed Waste Management SOPs: Our AI-powered SOP generator helps streamline workplace safety practices for waste handling and segregation, spill management, employee training, and frequent evaluation and modification of the waste management strategy.
- Detailed Reporting & Analytics: A powerful feature of Xenia's food waste management system that goes beyond simply logging waste. It provides an in-depth analysis of the data collected, helping businesses identify recurring patterns in food waste.
Xenia Pricing
- Free Forever: Free for up to 5 users with access to task & work orders, parent assets, internal chats, template builder, etc.
- Starter: $99 / month for 15 users and comes with a work calendar view, work and template reports, sub-assessments, and sub-locations.
- Premium: $199 / month for 15 users and offers unbound access to all the core features.
- Custom: Need something tailored to your organization?
Priced on per user or per location basis
Available on iOS, Android and Web
2. LeanPath
With the help of AI and culinary assistance, Leanpath's intelligent food waste management solution reduces food waste in half and improves kitchen productivity.
Their clients are trained, coached, and supported by their team of executive chefs and food service experts using tried-and-true, practical best practices for preventing food waste.
They don't simply leave technology in your kitchen. To guarantee success, they collaborate with your culinary staff.
From single sites to worldwide deployments across thousands of kitchens, Leanpath helps customers guarantee they reach their financial and sustainability goals.
Leanpath's food waste solutions are tailored to your particular business and requirements.
Key Features of LeanPath
- Track Food Waste: Food identification powered by AI allows for quick and precise data collection.
- Discover Actionable Insights: Capabilities for regional, global, multi-site, and single-site reporting to guarantee compliance at all levels.
- Drive Results: AI-powered team engagement tools, food waste summaries, and daily action items.
LeanPath Pricing
- Contact the vendor for pricing.
3. SmartKitchen App
FoodWasteTracker is able to obtain the current day's menu from the kitchen's menu application, such as production planning systems or point of sale systems.
When logging trash, the menu items are instantly displayed on the waste scale.
Every meal item's quantity of food waste is examined separately. Additionally, waste data can be sent straight to the system for production planning.
Based on the prior waste data, you will be aware of the accurate production amount the next time you intend to make the meal in question.
There is a considerable way to cut down on food waste.
Why Smart Kitchen App?
- WasteScale: The ideal application for SmartKitchen FoodWasteTracker is a collecting site with lots of activity, like a manufacturing kitchen.
- Food Waste Tracker: Food waste reduction and monitoring via an online service (license). Waste scale monitoring that is automated
- Plate Waste app: Plate waste is shown both graphically and numerically. The eatery is free to determine how much food waste is acceptable.
SmartKitchen App Pricing
- Contact the vendor for pricing.
4. Apicbase
Apicbase helps you reduce waste based on the data you collect and makes waste logging simple and error-free.
By ensuring that your restaurants have the proper amount of food on hand, it reduces the possibility of food waste or spoiling.
Apicbase's recipe data and food waste management app is used by major restaurant and food service organizations all over the world to optimize their operations and boost profitability.
In addition to saving money on food expenses, cutting waste will show your customers that your company is committed to sustainability and social responsibility.
This is a win-win situation for the environment and your business.
Apicbase's Key Features
- Manage Execution: To create plans for each outlet, drag & drop recipes. Assign staff members tasks and track their progress.
- Safeguard Consistency: To guarantee flawless outcomes at every unit, production jobs include comprehensive plating and preparation instructions.
- Avoid Wastage: Obtain precisely computed batch sizes depending on real demand. It's your pass to consistent food budget management.
Apicbase Pricing
- Contact the vendor for pricing.
5. MarketMan
With improved visibility into where food waste is coming from, MarketMan's waste tracking features assist restauranteurs in being proactive and cutting food expenditures.
With the help of this report, you should be able to determine where your waste is coming from, how it is trending (ideally, it will be getting less!), and how waste and purchases are related.
Any device can be used to swiftly enter waste occurrences, which will be displayed in an organized waste report for you.
Sort your reports according to date, place, category, or item to get the most information possible on inventory variance and learn how to reduce it.
Why MarketMan?
- Digital CookBook: With an easy-to-use, user-friendly recipe database that you can access from anywhere, you can create lucrative dishes by entering the ingredients, serving sizes, directions, and pictures for each recipe.
- Recipe Costing: To design profitable and cost-effective recipes, you may access robust reports that provide up-to-date information on the costs of individual ingredients for every menu item you serve.
- Inventory Management: Increase menu profitability, lower COGS, and quickly produce reports that compare actual to theoretical gross profits, COGS, and other metrics.
MarketMan Pricing
- Operator: $239/monthly
- Professional: $299/monthly
- Ultimate: $429/monthly
6. Winnow
The Winnow analytics platform helps chefs and kitchen teams reduce food waste by providing real-time data and actionable insights.
With the support of dedicated operational teams, best practices and expertise are shared in the local language to help implement changes effectively.
The platform includes a bilingual customer support team and a proven training and onboarding program, ensuring all staff can easily learn how to use the system.
This system uses an integrated camera and scale to track and photograph food waste, helping teams identify waste patterns and encouraging behavior changes.
Monthly online skill sessions and a 100-day onboarding period with a dedicated success manager ensure that kitchen teams receive continuous support and training, allowing them to make the most of the platform and reduce waste effectively.
Winnow's Key Features
- Vision Control: Waste photos are automatically captured by the built-in camera to increase visibility.
- Vision AI: Easy-to-use implementation using pre-made menu templates that are tailored to the food cost profile of your market and industry.
- Vision AI+: Up to 20 unique items can be added to a customizable menu per site. Extended warranty for hardware that covers unintentional damage
Winnow Pricing
- Contact the vendor for pricing.
7. xtraCHEF By Toast
Toast works with xtraCHEF by Toast to provide you with more control over the food waste at your restaurant.
Our platform assists you in putting into practice a dependable procedure for recording all forms of food waste—from spills to spoiling—directly in the inventory management module.
Simply select the waste type, cause, and quantity and add a waste event against an inventory item.
To find patterns, you can also upload pictures of the precise waste occurrence and link them to particular workers, occasions, and causes.
Based on the most recent prices obtained through the automated restaurant invoice processing system, this software automatically determines the cost of the waste.
Why Chose xtraCHEF?
- Ingredient-Specific Waste Reduction: Discover tailored strategies to minimize waste for each ingredient used in your kitchen.
- Support Local Communities: Connect with local food donation partners to give back and make a positive impact in your community.
- Digital Resource Library: Access a collection of online tools and guides designed to help you improve profit margins and reduce food waste effectively.
xtraCHEF Pricing
- Contact the vendor for pricing.
8. OptimoRoute
Routes and schedules for deliveries and mobile workers are planned and optimized via OptimoRoute.
The objective of the company is to provide everyone with access to the most advanced planning, routing, and scheduling optimization technologies available.
Businesses adore them because they boost profits by completing more deliveries and work orders, boosting productivity and customer happiness, and reducing operating expenses and overtime.
They achieve this by dramatically enhancing efficiency.
Our in-house, ongoing creation and enhancement of top-notch algorithms guarantees that your operations will gradually become better and more efficient.
Key Features of OptimoRoute
- Coordinated Orders: Require multiple persons to do a task? With the help of the Coordinated Orders tool, everyone's schedules are kept on track.
- Automated Planning: You can quickly get the most effective routes and timetables for your drivers by importing thousands of orders with ease. Take into consideration every process restriction.
- Order and Task: Consider all order and task parameters, including priority, time slots, day of the week, date range, reverse logistics orders, variable job durations, skills matching, and more, as you optimize for the optimum routes and timetables.
Pricing
- Lite: $35.10
- Pro: $44.10
- Custom
Final Thoughts
The world's food waste problem isn't going away anytime soon, and standard waste management systems aren't designed to handle the extra waste generated by this type of industry.
To help bridge the gap, businesses must employ smart food waste management technologies like Xenia, which improve efficiency, address the core cause of waste generation, and cost-effectively streamline waste management.
Book a demo to learn more.