Strategies to measure and manage hospital food waste

This research aims to close the practice gap of how food waste is measured and managed in hospital foodservices by expanding the knowledge regarding alternative food waste management strategies and by encouraging participation in routine food waste audits. First two systematic reviews were completed to explore the knowledge around the current problem of food waste in hospitals (year one). Two papers emerged from this step: 1. A systematic review exploring aggregate food waste measurement techniques, where the outcome was a consensus tool which explains the best methods for measuring hospital food waste, 2. A systematic review exploring hospitals who manage their food waste more responsibly by diverting it from landfill, where the outcome was 80 examples of hospitals either donating surplus food, composting food waste, sending it to anaerobic digestion facilities and using many other strategies to divert waste from landfill. This next steps for this research are to explore the perspectives of those working in hospitals on the feasibility of food waste audits (year two), before completing pilot audits to test the practicality of the consensus tool developed in the first study (year three).