Most restaurant food waste is cooked before anyone orders it, or cooked again because the first ticket was wrong. The fix is to buy from yesterday’s sales, keep ingredient stock tied to the dishes you sell, write down what you throw away, and send the sold order to the kitchen display so the line cooks that plate once.
The UNEP Food Waste Index Report 2024 estimates that food service accounted for 28 percent of the 1.05 billion tonnes of food wasted worldwide in 2022. A single café in Dhaka or Chattogram will not move that number. It can stop paying for chicken, rice, and oil that never became a paid bill.
Where restaurant food waste comes from
Waste in a working kitchen usually has three sources. You prepped more than the same weekday sold last week. A lost or shouted ticket was cooked, then cooked again when the guest asked for the real order. Spoiled stock left the shelf without anyone writing it down, so the next market run repeats the same buy.
- Over-prep: the pot is sized by habit, not by the sales report.
- Remakes: the kitchen cooked a slip that never matched the bill.
- Unrecorded loss: trim, spoilage, and a dropped plate never hit the stock count.
How to reduce food waste in a restaurant
Do these five things in order. Each one uses a record you already need to close the day.
- Open yesterday’s sales, and last week’s same weekday, before you go to the market.
- Tie each dish to the ingredient stock it uses, so a sale reduces those components.
- Record spoilage and damage as a stock adjustment, not as a guess at close.
- Send the sold order to the kitchen display or a kitchen printer. Cook that ticket once.
- Read the low-stock alert before you refill a slow item “just in case.”
Cook what you sold yesterday
A sales report is a prep list. If Friday lunch sold 40 plates of kacchi and 12 plates of chicken, Saturday’s buy should start there, then adjust for a holiday or rain. Riser POS keeps that report with the payments, so the number is the bills you printed, not the cook’s memory of a busy shift.
Export the sales sheet when you want to compare two weeks side by side. The point is a smaller pot, not a new spreadsheet habit that nobody opens.
Track ingredients, not only finished plates
A plate count tells you what guests ordered. It does not tell you how much chicken is left in the fridge. Riser POS tracks products and their components, and it can track items you produce from ingredients. Dimdul maps that to your menu at installation, which takes about 30 minutes for a simple menu and 2 to 3 hours for a larger one.
When a burger sells, the components on that item move with it. Low-stock notifications then flag what to reorder, which is the opposite of buying a full crate because the shelf looked thin at 11 a.m.
Write down what you threw away
A sale is not the only way stock leaves. Trim, a spoiled batch, and a plate that hit the floor should be a stock adjustment for damage or loss. The adjustment log is the waste record. If that log is empty and the bin is full, the next purchase order is still too big.
Do the adjustment at the end of the shift, while the cook can still name what went out. A weekly inventory count, with a barcode scanner or by hand, catches anything the adjustment missed.
Stop cooking the wrong ticket
A remake is waste you already paid to cook. Paper slips disappear between the counter and the pass. A kitchen display shows the order that was sold, including modifiers, so the line cooks that plate. A kitchen printer does the same job where a screen is awkward. Both are part of Riser POS for restaurants. How the screen fits a Bangladesh service is in what a kitchen display system does.
A weekly check for a Dhaka or Chattogram kitchen
Once a week, before the market run, look at three numbers only.
- Top dishes sold, so prep follows the bill.
- Stock adjustments for loss, so you see what never sold.
- Low-stock items that are actually moving, so you reorder those and let slow stock run down.
That is the whole system. It works on a single café and on a cloud kitchen with delivery tickets, because both still start from what was billed.
Questions restaurant owners ask
Prep from the sales report, not from habit. Cook the ticket that was sold, and write down spoilage as a stock adjustment so the next purchase is smaller.
Riser POS tracks products and their components, and it can track items produced from ingredients. Dimdul sets that up with your menu during installation.
Use a stock adjustment for damage and loss. The adjustment log shows what left the shelf without a sale.
WhatsApp Dimdul the size of your menu and whether you already have a kitchen screen. Installation is ৳5,000 and includes domain, hosting, and training. Restaurant software is ৳2,000 a month. Message on WhatsApp or read how shops moved their till in migrating to a cloud POS.