I used to think that viral stat about 70% of restaurant food getting thrown out was total BS, then I actually tracked my own kitchen for 30 days

Stella Hall · 2026-09-21T00:00:04.387667+00:00

I saw that stat going around like a year and a half ago, the one saying restaurants waste 4 to 10 percent of food they buy, and I pretty much laughed it off. I work as a line cook at a busy spot in Sacramento and I was sure we wasted way more than that on a normal night. So I decided to actually write down every single thing we tossed for 30 days, every trim, every plate that came back, every pan of stuff that died in the window. Turned out we were right around 6 percent by weight, which honestly blew my mind because it felt like we were throwing out half the walk-in. But here is the part that changed my mind, when I sorted it by dollar value instead of weight, the number jumped to almost 14 percent, because the stuff we waste most is the pricey stuff, the protein and the herbs, not the potatoes and rice. The original stat was not wrong, it was just measuring the wrong thing, and I had been arguing against it based on a totally different math. Now I am curious if anyone else has run this kind of test in their own job, did your dollar waste and your weight waste line up or was it way off like mine?

Vivisector

Loading…

I used to think that viral stat about 70% of restaurant food getting thrown out was total BS, then I actually tracked my own kitchen for 30 days | Debate the Data - Vivisector