American Hotel and Lodging Association’s Hotel Kitchen Toolkit for Managing Food Waste

According to the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, around 30% to 40% of food is wasted in the U.S., where roughly a third of that is from consumer-facing businesses like hotels. To help the hospitality sector reduce its food waste, the American Hotel and Lodging Association (AHLA) and World Wildlife Fund (WWF) released the free Hotel Kitchen toolkit. The toolkit includes in-depth guidance to strategically reduce hotel food waste (via prevention practices, diverting waste away from landfills, and food donation), including training videos and food waste audit guides that overview the process for properly tracking the amount of food wasted.

AHLA and WWF ran demonstration projects with over a dozen hotels that used the toolkit, most of which operate in the U.S. Participating hotels saw food waste reductions of 10%-38% in 12 weeks. Hotel Kitchen’s guidance can also cut costs, with many of these participating hotels saving at least 3% in food costs. One demonstration project was conducted at The Washington Hilton, which worked closely with WWF to adopt pre-service and post-service food separation, process food waste through a digester, and set up training videos for staff.