The public perception is that cruise ships generate a lot of food waste. Is it true? It doesn’t have to be.
Galley operations often prepare food for thousands of people, and cruise ship guests like to indulge in all of the food offerings available, so naturally, there will always be some food waste, but it doesn’t have to be more than necessary.
To help you limit the food waste only to unavoidable amounts, here are my 5 tips to reduce food waste on cruise ships.
1. Engineer low-waste recipes and menus
When it comes to prep waste, I like to say that it’s built into the recipe before the prep even starts. As we can predict the amount of prep waste during the recipe engineering process, we can easily avoid that prep waste by designing recipes and menus that naturally use up the byproducts.
As galley operations on cruise ships serve a large number of guests each day, this gives you an upside in planning for byproducts, as you have larger quantities to work with.
For example, if you have to peel carrots for a certain dish, you can divert the peels to use by creating another dish that utilises them on the same day. Carrot peels can be used for crisps, crumble, sauce, spreads or reductions, and by including them naturally in another dish, you are avoiding the need for extra time to work with the byproduct, as in this case, the byproduct is an essential ingredient for another dish.
2. Reduce portion sizes on buffets
While cruise ship buffets must always look full and appealing, there are a few things we can do to reduce the food waste. One of them is to reduce the portion sizes, or the size of individual items on the buffet.
For example:
- Can you serve chicken strips instead of portioning the chicken breasts into 100g servings?
- Can you downsize pastry items and bread rolls by 30%, so guests are more likely to finish them?
- Can you pre-portion certain items, like salads in small bowls, which would help your guests take less?
These are only examples, but if you can downsize even only one or two items on your buffet, it will allow you to have better portion control and contribute to your food waste reduction goals.
3. Measure your food waste
If you don’t know what is in your bin, you don’t know what to focus on. Most chefs simply guess what creates most of the food waste, without any data to prove it. This means that we might end up focusing on a dish or a category of food waste that isn’t really the biggest driver of our food waste, while our focus should be somewhere else.
If you are worried that food waste measurement will disrupt your galley operations, I have some good news. There is no need for manual work or digging through the bins to see what was wasted. With automated AI tools like Winnow and its touch-free technology, food waste measurement is easier than ever. Chefs simply discard the food in the usual way, and AI does all the work for you, so you can make better decisions. As the saying goes, you can’t manage what you don’t measure.
4. Refresh chefs in knife skills
Does one extra centimetre of cucumber trimming really matter?
While the majority of food waste on cruise ships might come from the buffet, there is often a lot of waste created before the food is even served: in the kitchen, as prep waste. One of the biggest drivers of prep waste is excessive trimming, and by far the easiest solution to reduce trimmings is to refresh your chefs in knife skills.
That little bit of extra trimming from each side of the vegetable, on every vegetable, will add up to a lot of avoidable food waste. Bring your chefs together for a 15-minute knife skills session and establish new trimming standards. Be clear about the expected yield of each product and how exactly each vegetable and fruit should be prepped and trimmed to avoid wasting raw ingredients.
The best part? This step is available immediately, as it requires no budget, no approvals and no new recipes.
5. Keep the watermelon rind in the kitchen
Stop serving watermelon with its rind attached. Watermelon rind is one of the most wasted byproducts in a cruise ship’s galley operations. The good news is that it’s not only edible and healthy, but also very easy to use - as long as we keep it in the kitchen!
The only operational change you have to make here is to peel the watermelon twice: First, peel off a thin layer of the dark green skin, which can be composted as it has a hard texture, then peel the white rind, which can be diverted to another use. This brings me back to the first tip - you have to count on using watermelon rinds during the menu engineering process.
Watermelon rind is similar to a cucumber or a zucchini, and you can use it just like any other vegetable: in salads, fillings, fritters, curries, stews, spring rolls or quick-pickles.
Follow Chef Vojtech Vegh, Winnow's Zero Waste Culinary Advisor, for more tips and tricks like these.
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