Restaurant food-ordering application Blue Cart launched the Zero Waste Kitchen initiative, which challenges chefs and restaurants around the world to limit waste and improve their sustainability. To help kickstart the movement, it challenged three chefs to improve their sustainability over the next two months and will share their steps with the industry and the world.
Although millions of people around the world still struggle to find enough food to eat, many parts of the developed world waste huge quantities of food. Blue Cart claims that its application can help restaurants cut their food waste by around 50 percent, so through its initiative, it’s hoping to take that even further and encourage all restaurants to follow best practices.
To that end, it’s challenged chefs Jehangir Mehta, Tanya Holland, and Tim Ma over the next two months, to waste as little food and energy as possible. Blue Cart will be assigning them a sustainability score to denote how successful they have been. It will be their challenge to improve that score over time.
Developed alongside partners Food + Tech Connect, Entrepreneurial Chef magazine, Aspire, and 7Shifts, the zero waste program will be looking at food waste, how the chefs inhibit the use of paper, and how much they cut back on their electrical usage. In a more nebulous fashion, we’re also told they will be judged on their promotion of a more sustainable environment within the restaurant industry, according to Benzinga.
Set to begin on March 20, the Zero Waste Kitchen initiative will conclude on May 8, where the three chefs will take part in a live, three-day event on Twitter to answer any questions that fans or fellow restaurant owners may have about the improvements they made to their working environments.
Although much of this challenge must be taken in context with a pinch of salt — Blue Cart is using it to advertise its own app and web-based restaurant ordering services — the overall cause is admirable.
Updated 03/14/2017 by Jon Martindale – clarified that this is a challenge, not a contest.
