5 ways to make your restaurant more sustainable

Work with local farmers

One of the most obvious ways to make your restaurant more sustainable is by working with local farmers, family businesses and local producers. When you don’t import ingredients from other continents, you not only help to reduce carbon emissions caused by public transport, but you also support local producers and the local economy in general. When sourcing locally, you can also ensure the top quality of the ingredients and even visit the producers (often – family businesses).

Offer seasonal menus

Eating seasonal produce is usually healthier and better for people. Moreover, eating seasonal food is more sustainable, as again, there is no long-haul transport involved. Furthermore, seasonal food also helps restaurants safe money, as seasonal produce is usually available in abundance and is often affordable. Offering seasonal menus is an excellent way for a restaurant to adjust its menu and start using fruits and vegetables that are in season. It’s also a great way to offer new dishes for your returning customers.

Offer more vegetarian and vegan options

Meat and dairy industry are the two most polluting branches of the food industry. Moreover, more and more people are considering reducing their meat consumption because of ethical reasons. Vegetarian food doesn’t have to be boring – you can still be creative with a lot of vegetarian and even vegan dishes. Many of your customers will appreciate the abundance of vegetarian dishes in your menu, too.

Reduce food waste

While some of the restaurants nowadays are becoming completely zero-waste (check out Silo), for most of the places, it’s still an impossible task. That, however, doesn’t stop you from reducing your food waste as much as possible.

How can you reduce your restaurant food waste?

Well, first, you can invest in a good and advanced ePOS that would help you organise and track your ingredients and stock. Secondly, you can introduce a special surprise set menu with the ingredients that are in surplus and otherwise might have been wasted. Then, you can also reduce the quantities of the ingredients you’re ordering – it’s much better to run out of a couple of dishes from the menu than throw away kilos of meat and fish.

It’s hard to make use of all the stock you ordered, hence some waste will be inevitable. In this case, you can compost the organic waste and minimise the amount of garbage your throw in the landfill.

Don’t print another paper receipt, switch to the digital bills.

UK restaurant industry prints an insane amount of bills every year and 90% of them can’t be recycled, as they are printed on the thermal paper. Most of the bills are never even looked at and are thrown away after a couple of minutes. While many small businesses (and bigger companies as well) already switched to paperless receipts, the restaurant industry hasn’t evolved much in this area, until Yetipay came along.

Yetipay is a smart mobile payment terminal that allows you to get rid of paper receipts and switch to digital bills instead. Moreover, it improves the table turn times, gathers real-time customer feedback and increases waiter tips. Also, Yetipay is available without a contract and works with all ePOS. Please help us save trees!