Zero waste with Eat Street

Picture of Laurel Wibberley

Laurel Wibberley

What do we mean when we say we try a be as zero waste as we can be?
Now, whilst we believe that ‘zero waste’ is more a mindset and something to strive towards – having the mantra of ‘zero waste’ helps us make a lot of our decisions, and move our business along.

Zero waste for us isn’t about not producing any waste, it’s about utilising that ‘waste’ to another use – for example, compost, charity, personal use.

Since the start, we’ve been a pre order only business, we know exactly how many portions of the dishes we’re making & serving. This was something that was crucial to Eat Street’s success from the beginning – we weren’t throwing huge amounts of food away at the end of the evening, which meant we weren’t throwing money away either. This is something that isn’t really a factor for us – it’s more about the food waste, but as a small business, we’re mindful that everything has a cost associated to it. 

Alex designed the takeaway menu in a way that if we had 3 pulled pork burgers to serve in an evening, he would defrost overnight 3 portions of slow cooked pulled pork, and 3 raw bread rolls to bake fresh that day. EVERYTHING was meticulously measured!

We’ve tried to minimise our waste where possible, which is constantly evolving. We’ve made several improvements over the last 5 years including:

  • Completely eliminating cling film from both the Eat Street & personal kitchen

  • Turning veg trimmings into kimchi, which we enjoy personally

  • Donating our cardboard waste and compost to Pallance Road Plants

  • Freezing left over food to consume personally

  • Buying items such as chopped tomatoes or garlic in bulk and freezing

  • Portioning meat / sauces / grains etc per person and multiplying up depending on guest numbers

  • Using recyclable vac pack bags – these are more expensive, but a non negotiable for us

The experience we’ve gained over the last 5 years has also given us the confidence to explain to clients if they’re going to have too much food, or not enough time for all the food. We’ve done 2 events, specifically that we remember for leftover food – which we leave with the client to enjoy the next day. But this has shown us that essentially, we’re the experts when it comes to our food – if timings don’t allow for multiple meals, or dessert table then we’ll come up with a different idea with our client. If portion sizes are going to be too large, too close to another meal, we’ll discuss with our client to reduce the size.

For us, it’s not about the money. We’d rather reduce our total bill and have no food waste.

The meat, curries and stews we provide is always weighed into portions, additional bread dough is frozen for us to enjoy for lunches. Alex will work out exactly how much meat is needed for an event, based on the portion size dependant on menu & dish. For example, most of our burgers have 200g of meat, most of our family style menus have 150g of meat. 

 

Each recipe will be developed, often over a number of months to ensure we know exactly how much of each ingredient we need to order to multiply up the quantity. Yes, we get it wrong sometimes – but the surplus food just goes into our personal freezer!

 

A perfect example of when it doesn’t all go to plan… 

We were doing our usual 2 day cook on these lovely ox cheeks and we went to check on them in the oven. Unfortunately the oven had failed us (first time) and was not up to temperature for some reason unknown. The ox cheeks were sat in the danger zone and unsafe to serve to our customers. We had to throw it all away……70 cheeks……35 cow’s cheeks 😔

Devastated is an understatement. A low point for us but outside of our control.

The repercussions-

•Luckily we don’t chance cooking the meat up until the last second before your event, we leave enough time to correct anything that could possibly go wrong. New beef from The Butcher Shop, Cowes (at our cost) brined and on to cook, this time using a water bath whilst our oven is down.

• We are now using a different cut of meat because it was too late to get enough cheeks from the IOW. We gave our bride and groom the option of a different cut or cheeks from the mainland. That meant new menus printing – we covered the cost of that so our B&G don’t have to.

• We probably won’t get our oven fixed before Saturday so this means adaptive planning to help us achieve this menu without our oven we usually rely so heavily on. We have purchased some extra equipment and are drawing on some other kit from HQ including our smoker which usually doesn’t travel.

We adapt, and we learn. This difficult lesson in ‘sometimes equipment fails you’ has taught us to not rely on things so heavily, so we’ve bought a blue tooth thermometer that sends an alert to our phones when the oven / water bath drops below a certain temperature we get a notification on ours phones and Alexa. Even in the middle of the night!

One of our non-negotiables is freshly baked bread on every event day – often this requires Alex to start work at 4am. He doesn’t do this for the bread to be enjoyed the next day – we want it to be enjoyed fresh on the day!

We have had enquiries in the past from people who simply do not get this element of our business – it’s a fundamental value to our small company. We do not buy in bread (other than GF to ensure cross contamination is kept to a minimum). Yes, we have to charge more for freshly prepared bread, but that’s part of the service. Our brightly coloured burger buns and flatbreads are some of our signature items – and are well known across the island

When you book Eat Street you can guarantee that we’ll make every effort to ensure waste for your event is kept to an absolute minimum, something that, within the hospitality industry isn’t often thought about. For us, it’s the forefront of our minds. Always.

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