Becoming an Eco-Friendly Restaurant Easy Ways Your Commercial Kitchen Can Go Green

Environmentally Friendly Restaurant. Easy Ways to Create a Green Restaurant.

Easy ways your commercial kitchen can go green

These days, everything is going green and for a good reason – no doubt. Getting your restaurant to become more eco-friendly is beneficial for all and can be achieved by using the most efficient foodservice equipment, and by managing your commercial kitchen’s food waste.

A great place to start in becoming a green, eco restaurant, is to get your community involved. Your community is an ecosystem and restaurants are a main hub for community members. By practicing sustainability in your restaurant, you are saving resources such as energy and labor, while minimizing your food waste and ultimately saving money.  Can you imagine what some simple sustainable practices could do for your restaurant and community?

Environmentally friendly restaurants are the way of the future… or we sure hope so at least. Here are some easy ways your restaurant can be more sustainable.

Maintain Product Efficiency: Green Restaurants Need Green Equipment

Selecting the correct foodservice equipment could be the most essential part to operating a green restaurant and to serving up your delicious menu. Take product efficiency into consideration when shopping for new foodservice equipment as it is more eco-friendly and helps save on energy usage.

New foodservice equipment is designed with energy efficiency in mind.  New designs minimize heat loss, can cook different products at the same time without the need to do multiple batches of cooking, and have smart controllers that program cook times and minimize energy requirements in downtimes.

Efficient Design: The Antunes Gold Standard Toaster was designed to be energy efficient and reduces heat loss.

Environmentally friendly, green restaurants are using the latest, most efficient equipment. Utilizing the latest, most energy efficient model helps your restaurant reduce energy waste. While upgrading your foodservice equipment can be a big to-do, it ensures that your restaurant is not wasting resources by using old, less-efficient equipment.

Explore modernization by implementing new technology in your kitchen such as automation.  Automation can support your restaurant sustainability practices by reducing food waste and labor needs. In an already tight labor market, automating simple repetitive tasks through innovative solutions, with Antunes automation products, allows you to redirect your team to assist with customer facing needs instead.

Antunes Automation Solution: The Antunes Automated Chicken Breading automatically coats chicken strips, nuggets and wings in milk wash and evenly coats with a breading mixture.  This eliminates the tedious task of hand breading, and minimizes food waste while delivering a more consistent and higher quality product.

Preventative measures on existing or new equipment are also essential to your equipment’s life span. The health of your foodservice equipment and the upkeep of certain wearable parts or components can be big contributing factors to efficiency and consumption.

Adding water treatment equipment to your restaurant can significantly improve operations.  Water softeners and reverse osmosis systems can be used to eliminate hard scale build-up on steamers and combi machines.  Filtration systems can be added to remove sediment and oxidizing agents which are harmful to cooking equipment and beverage production.

More than 50% of all restaurant water usage is associated with the cooking equipment and processes that occur in the kitchen.  Providing high quality water to the kitchen will reduce energy costs of water using appliances.  Without scale build-up, equipment will operate more efficiently and require less maintenance and down time.  High quality water also insures consistent pressure and flow to the operations, as well as consistent, crisp tasting beverages.

Antunes Efficiency Product Hero: The Antunes VZN Water Filtration System uses just one low-cost carbon cartridge that lasts 2 years, compared to eight filters with competitive units – reducing landfill waste 1:8! The ultra-filtration cartridge is designed to last up to 10 years.

Reduce Food Waste: Eco-Friendly Restaurants Minimize Food Waste

As food waste in a commercial kitchen is frequent, it is important mitigate food waste related overhead.

If you’re not sure how to make a restaurant more eco-friendly, you could begin with minimizing the amount of food that your restaurant is wasting. Food waste effects your bottom line and some say it feels like throwing money into the trash.

Accurately budget your inventory needs with modern software and tools to ensure both consistency and efficacy.  Monitor food temperatures and holding times.  Follow the First In First Out procedure when monitoring inventory.  Staying organized can handle food quantity issues. Automating kitchen tasks could also reduce food waste and reduce employee handling while delivering a more consistent product.

Technology Tip: The Antunes Automated Bun Feeder reduces employee food handling and food waste while providing a hotter product.

Reducing food waste isn’t an easy task, however it is an important aspect of being environmentally friendly as a commercial kitchen in your community. 

Help your Community: Be the Friendly in Eco-Friendly

Your green restaurant plays a part in your community, so becoming more eco-friendly can extend the benefits even further than your establishment. Practicing sustainability, even if only in your commercial kitchen, does benefit your local area.

Educating your staff on restaurant sustainability practices directly empowers community members with eco-friendly experience that can be translated to non-work related applications. Another way to get your community involved, is hosting, or planning a local food drive or donation focused event to invite fellow community members to participate in. Environmentally friendly restaurants strategically structure their supply chain and sourcing methods to work with other companies that share their mission to be environmentally friendly.

The sustainability requirements in a commercial kitchen are always evolving and we commend you for your efforts in working towards being a more green restaurant. The world could use more environmentally friendly restaurants so trying any of these practices can help your commercial kitchen be more eco-friendly.

As an organization, Antunes and their Corporate Social Responsibility is led by the rooted desire to positively impact the world while building an enduring, great company. As a family-owned and operated company, we are uniquely positioned to have a strong purpose-driven culture that cares about sustainability measures.

We invite you, your team, and your commercial kitchen to practice eco-friendly measures with us.

Read more about Antunes’ Corporate Social Responsibility and Sustainability.

More Sustainability:

Tune in as the Around the Table with Antunes podcast expands on sustainability.

Part 1: https://antunes.com/news/antunes-commitment-to-sustainability-part-1/

Part 2: https://antunes.com/news/antunes-commitment-to-sustainability-part-2/