Gone are the days where takeout food can sell itself with its USP of being tasty food available for the customer’s convenience. With fierce competition around in modern times, especially with restaurants who are diversifying their businesses by offering takeout with delivery services such as Uber Eats, there are new demands for takeout only businesses to meet. One such demand is the increasingly worrying environmental problem, which is becoming an ethical consideration at the forefront of many customers’ minds.
As a result, businesses are adapting their practices in order to ensure they are sustainable and environmentally friendly. We’ve come up with some ways that your current or future takeout delivery business can adopt eco-friendly practices, to not only help the environment but the consciences of your customers too.
Here are 3 Ways To Make Your Takeout Delivery Business Eco-Friendly:
1. Reduce Packaging Waste
The very nature of takeout food is somewhat wasteful, given that takeout delivery businesses need to serve their food in cheap and disposable – but practical – packaging. The current biodegradable and recyclable cardboard options on the wholesale market are expensive, which isn’t suitable for cheaper street food vendors who already sell their food for next-to-nothing anyway.
As much as you can try to encourage customers to come to get their takeout with their old takeaway containers to reuse them – it’s tough. Realistically, most customers will forget to bring them. Why? because they can’t even remember to bring their shopping bags with them to the supermarket!
Re-using old containers also means that there are potential hygiene problems. As you cannot ensure that customers have washed their containers to meet the food safety standards, this could cause cross-contamination issues. PKG Lab is one wholesaler offering a solution for any takeout delivery business by selling flexible packaging, which means that a takeout owner only needs to buy one type of packaging to serve different varieties of food.
This saves waste, reduces energy consumption in the production of the packaging, and saves money too.
2. Reduce Food Waste
Try to reduce the amount of food waste caused by over-preparing or over-portioning food. Start by having a look at the type of food and the exact amounts of food that is going in the garbage.
Monitoring and predicting customer levels can also provide a brief guideline on how much food you should cook for the day, as well as save money on ingredients. If you do produce any food waste that it is disposed of in a bin designated for compost, you can use it in your own garden as fertilizer for the plants that you use as ingredients in the kitchen!
3. Reduce Energy Waste
Like other businesses and restaurants, a takeout delivery business can opt for energy-efficient options to save not only their money but reduce the emissions and energy of their appliances.
For example, simply changing the shop’s lighting system to work on LED or energy-efficient bulbs can reduce the light energy wasted. Installing an automatic lighting system will also help to cut back on the amount of electricity used when no one is occupying the room, and the money spent on bills too!
Making your takeout delivery business eco-friendly doesn’t have to be difficult. There are many more ways – beyond what we have suggested – that can improve the environmental sustainability of your takeout. Making your business eco-friendly doesn’t just make business sense, but logical sense too!
If you enjoyed this post – check out our post about why your food business needs to use Biodegradable food containers.
