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Pastries and desserts are just some of the “prolifically problematic” foods that are most likely to go to waste at meetings and events.
Aurora Dawn Benton, founder of Astrapto, a sustainability and social impact consulting firm, has polled more than 1,000 planners and venue staff to establish the kinds of food items that are most likely to be wasted at events — “and it is the same stuff every time, over and over and over again,” Benton said. The results from that data, combined with research conducted by the World Wildlife Fund and the Pacific Coast Food Waste Commitment, a partnership between food-related organizations on the West Coast, have produced a list of what Benton calls “prolifically problematic” items including:
- Pastries and desserts
- Fruit, salad, and toppings
- Condiments and sauces
- Cheese and charcuterie boards
- Bread and bagels
Sustainability expert Aurora Dawn Benton
Because many of those items are relatively inexpensive, Benton said, planners and venues often overorder and overproduce them — and because they don’t cost as much relative to other menu items, it’s easy to overlook how much of it is wasted.
But those most-often wasted food items make a great, low-stakes place for event planners and venues to begin to reduce waste, Benton said. “Why not start with these very basic things that should be safe territory because we sort of unanimously and universally agree these are problems?” she asked. “Nobody wants to touch entrees, but fixing bread seems like a pretty safe thing to do.”
That strategy — to focus on a few of the most commonly wasted foods at events — was one Benton put into place when she worked with event planning and catering teams for the Circularity 23 conference organized by The Trellis Group (formerly GreenBiz Group) and held at the Hyatt Regency Seattle in June 2023. The event drew more than 1,400 global participants for three days to discuss building a circular economy.
Before the conference began, Astrapto provided food-waste prevention training to the conference event planners and the venue catering teams. That training, which called attention to the fact that condiments are often poured to fit the size of bowls and pitchers, not the numbers of people they will serve, led catering staff to pivot to smaller serving pitchers on the first day of the conference. On the second day, catering staff switched out the square bowls that butter was served in to bowls one-third their size, resulting in a 60- percent reduction in waste. The catering staff made other small but high-impact adjustments to how food was offered to participants, such as offering only one kind of fruit on a tray — when a variety of fruit is offered, it’s often the case that less-popular fruit goes to waste when a platter is refilled.
RELATED: Starting New and Better Conversations About Food Waste at Meetings
As a result of their efforts, there was virtually no waste of pastries, desserts, and cut fruit at the circularity conference — which would probably be cutting it too close for most events and catering teams who have spent decades operating on the principle of abundance and hospitality, according to a case study about the event created by Astrapto.
“This is all very scary territory,” Benton said. “No one wants to run out of food. Everybody’s afraid that we’re going to slap you on the wrist if you run out of bread. But what if we just could agree that, for this next event, we’re really going to tackle bread, that we’re going to get everybody on the same page. We’re going to talk to all the banquet staff, we’re going to all agree that these are the rules around bread, so that we don’t overproduce and overserve bread. And it seems silly and mundane, but we’re never going to be able to scaffold our practices to tackle the big problems if we can’t even start with just basic simple stuff like bread.”
Planners and venue staff can address those fundamental things by getting into the practice of taking very basic before-and-after metrics. “If you’re afraid that you’re going to mess up and not offer enough dessert, why don’t you audit your desserts every week for six weeks? That way you’ll get a comfortable range. If you figure out that you could reduce the size of your desserts by at least 25 percent, start there,” she said. We can give “both planners and venues a set of safe topics to begin having these conversations.”
Benton has found that “the No. 1 obstacle is attitude and mentality. And unfortunately, that is the hardest thing — we can’t AI our way out of that.” As long as humans are involved in the flow of food, things are going to happen that are driven by fear and other emotions, she said. That can be “combatted with simple processes — rules that make sense and data that makes sense.”
Barbara Palmer is deputy editor at Convene.