EXCLUSIVE: How KFC Is Stepping Up Efforts to Tackle Waste
Tackling waste is coming under renewed focus by QSRs, most recently with KFC's announcement of their plans to reduce their food waste to just 1.6% by 2017. QSR Media spoke with Janet Cox, Head of Health, Safety and Environment at KFC UK & Ireland to learn more about how they are going about it.
QSR: What is behind KFCs drive to reduce waste?
Our overall levels of waste are very low, but we hate any food being wasted, especially chicken, so we’re doing several different things to reduce, donate and recycle as much as we can.
QSR: When did efforts to tackle waste start?
We piloted our food donation programme last March in Brixton followed by four other stores in and around London. This sees our restaurants partner with local charities who arrange a pick up twice a week to collect chicken that we have not sold, but is perfectly safe to eat. We freeze, document and store this for the charity.
QSR: You’ve said that you expect waste to reduce from 2.5% to 1.6% in 2 years. What will drive the reduction? Can you get below 1.6%? And how does this number compare to your competitors?
Around 2.5% of our food in our stores is unsold. This a low percentage compared to the rest of the restaurant and hospitality sector but we want to go even further and get that figure to below 1.6%.
Half of our unsold food is chicken, and we know thanks to our pilot programme, that we can donate between two-thirds and three-quarters of this to a local charity partner. This is how we will achieve our 1.6% target. To put this into context, if we are calculate the amount of chicken by weight, each store serves the equivalent of around 150 chickens each day, with about 4 unsold. The good news is that when the programme is fully rolled out by 2017, we’ll be donating the equivalent of 3 of these, with the remainder sent to anaerobic digestion and turned into fertiliser and biogas.
When you consider that the average or our sector is nearer about a 20% by weight, our figures stack up quite well.
QSR: How are you able to increase the percentage of food going to food donation charities so dramatically?
We started work on our food donation programme last spring and have been working through the systems and training in our pilot restaurants and we are no ready to take the programme wide across our business in an effective, simple and safe way. From now on the rollout will speed up significantly. We’re aiming to have the donation programme in 100 restaurants by spring, half of our restaurants by the end of 2016 and all restaurants, where possible, by 2017.
QSR: Of the remaining 1.6%, what are those levels being driven by?
We sell freshly cooked food, most of which is chicken, so food safety and hygiene considerations must be taken into consideration before we can donate any food we can’t sell safely. We estimate that we can donate at least two thirds of unsold chicken into the programme.
Current regulations do not allow food waste that is meat, such as chicken, or food waste that has been in contact with meat or chicken, to be sent for animal feed.
QSR: What changes are you having to make to your operations to reduce waste?
Outside of the food donation programme we continue to work with our suppliers to help us reduce food waste in the first place such as changing some of our packaging so that it can be opened in smaller batches by team members, thereby avoiding opening more food than is needed. Most importantly, we already have in place advanced data systems to minimize waste through forecasting tools in every restaurant. Our restaurants update their forecasts 3-4 times a day, based on factors like season, weather and time of day, and can also look at the figures for the exact same day last year.
