Seeing masses of food being thrown away at the end of a buffet breakfast led me to investigate hotel food waste. On a recent holiday to Tenerife in the Canary Islands, I stayed at the Meliá Sol Arona hotel. It was a full buffet breakfast, with every option and cuisine you can think of.
At the end of the service, while I was still seated, staff began clearing away the leftover food from the buffet stations. To my shock, they wheeled in giant outdoor bins and began shovelling the food of the platters directly into the bins. Most of the food was untouched and presumably fresh.
Strict food safety regulations can be difficult to navigate no doubt. But like any business, hotels have a duty to ensure they are making every effort possible to reduce food waste. The UN Environment Programme’s found that 1.
05 billion tonnes of food went to waste in 2022. Around 19 per cent of food available to consumers was lost overall at retail, food service and household levels. So what are hotels doing to minimise food waste and does the breakfast buffet have a future? “Food safety legislation imposes strict guidelines on ,” Lourdes Ripoll de Oleza, Sustainability VP for Meliá Hotels International, says in response to my experience in Tenerife.
Meliá Hotels has over 200 properties in Europe and is the 17th biggest hotel chain worldwide. “Any food product exposed for consumption and not consumed by the customer is discarded to mitigate any potential health risks.” This means that in t.