Sometimes reducing food waste requires a bit of sacrifice. Perhaps it’s planning out your meals before grocery shopping or simply taking stock of the food you throw out (including the stuff that goes down the garbage disposal).
For customers at Stevi B’s, an Atlanta-based chain of all-you-can-eat pizza buffets, it means not having the B.L.T. and taco pizzas on the buffet. A waste-reducing initiative at that chain determined that those particular items don’t hold up well under the warming lights. Taco-pizza-loving customers must now request it.
The chain also curbs loss by making fewer pizzas during slow hours and even making some half-and-half pies. They’ve studied their losses by counting wasted pizzas, entering them into a database and making changes based on the findings. Easy as pie, says Stevi B’s Seth Salzman:
“Anytime you have something printed in black and white, it makes it a little more undeniable,” he says. “You can say, ‘Wow, in a week’s time, we threw away 25 entire pizzas.’”
As for those two reducd specialty pizzas, I can see both sides here. It’d be a bummer for B.L.T. or taco pizza lovers. But then again, does the world really need taco pizza? And you could always just call ahead and request one. Which is exactly what I’ll be doing with the B.L.T. pie the next time I’m in Georgia.
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