Free tools · food waste
Food waste cost = weekly food spend without VAT, times the share you throw away, plus what you pay to have it collected. So £4,500 a week with 10% thrown away is £450 a week, or £23,400 a year before collection.
Food in the bin is money in the bin. But most kitchens never add it up, so it is easy to ignore. Put in what you spend on food each week and roughly how much gets thrown away. The tool shows what that costs you each week, month and year, and what you would keep by cutting it a little.
The calculator
Nothing is sent anywhere. The maths runs in your browser and we never see what you type. Every field starts at a deliberately ordinary default rather than a flattering one.
Before you quote the figure at anyone
01
This tool counts what you paid for the food and to collect it. It does not count the staff time spent preparing food that was then thrown away, or the energy used to cook it. So the true cost of waste is higher than the figure here.
02
Most people guess too low, because waste happens in many small moments. The only reliable way is to measure it. Weigh the food waste bins for one normal week, and write down roughly where the waste came from.
03
Stock variance compares what your sales say you should have used with what you actually used. Waste is only one cause of that gap. A kitchen can have low variance and still throw a lot away, if the waste is being recorded properly.
Questions
Getting a number you don’t recognise from your own accounts is usually worth a conversation rather than another spreadsheet.
Take your weekly food spend without VAT and multiply it by the share you throw away. If you spend £4,500 a week and throw away 10%, that is £450 a week. Add what you pay to have food waste collected. Multiply by 52 for the yearly figure.
Use separate bins for prep waste, food that went out of date, and food left on plates. Weigh each bin at the end of every shift for one week and write it down. It takes a few minutes a day and shows you exactly where the waste comes from.
Order little and often instead of in big batches. Check portion sizes, because food left on plates often means portions are too large. Use a first in, first out system so older stock is used first. And look at your menu: dishes that rarely sell often cause the most waste.
A pound you stop wasting is a whole pound of profit. A pound of new sales is not, because most of it pays for the food, the staff and the other costs. If your profit is 6p in every £1, you need about £17 of new sales to make the same as £1 of waste saved.
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