James Taylor: At a specific site
we typically find that it’s the kitchen
manager, but it’s got to be bottom up
and top down. You’ve got to engage all
of the stakeholders that are relevant
for the size of your business and find
out what they care about, build some
sort of guidance and talk to them in
their language.
With an area manager or senior
operator, talking to them in terms of
the amount of chef hours they could
save and the amount of extra portions
they would have to sell to make that
same amount of profit. It starts to get
them talking in their language, because
they’re used to talking about sales,
profit and labour targets so the kitchen
managers will be turned on by turning
things off and seeing the impact of that
the day after through the data.
Oliver Rosevear: I think it’s
really important to engage across
teams. Everyone has their different
motivations, it might be environmental,
it might be cost and so it is about
making sure that you’re continually
refreshing that message as well,
especially because of the staff turnover.
One of the things we’ve started
moving towards is more online and
video-based training. When we used
the old school way of doing it, we
had these booklets which ended up
being doorstops. And you think, ‘how
do we really start to engage, how do
we start to tell that story about the
‘why?’’ It’s not just what you need to
do but also why am I doing it, what’s
the benefit and impact? I think a really
important part of sustainability is that
storytelling element, saying ‘this is
why we’re doing it’ as opposed to just
‘this is what we want you to do.’Martyn Clover: I think there’s been a
real change in terms of getting people
to buy into this. When you go to store
level, you don’t really have to sell it
to a lot of them. Most of the time, the
majority of people get that we have to
change the way we work and behave.
And as long as we’re engaging with
them, giving them the tools to be able
to do it and not expecting them to be
able to solve every issue, I’ve not really
seen any barriers to try and overcome.
It’s just making sure that it’s coming
from the top down and the bottom up.Could you share your top piece
of practical advice for reducing
energy, water and waste?James Taylor: Engage at all the right
levels, give them the right tools and
guidance to be able to act and then
give them the reporting that helps
embed it and prove the impact it’s had.In our business we do tend to have a
high turnover of staff so it has to be a
refreshed message that is on point with
the wider messages of the business.Oliver Rosevear: I sort of agree with
the whole engagement angle, right from
top down, making sure you’re involved
with the finance director and those guys
who are going to make those decisions.
But also thinking about how equipment
interacts with each other. Quite often
we’ll change a piece of equipment
and we don’t think about the negative
impact that might have on other
equipment in the back of house.
So, if I look at refrigeration, which
is probably the biggest usage, it
generates a huge amount of heat and
actually how do you start to utilise
that heat rather than seeing it as a bad
thing? We’ve taken the heat from our
refrigerators and put that into creating
hot water, looking at the whole system
as opposed to individual bits of kit.Martyn Clover: When I started
working in kitchens 20 years ago, the
tap was on all the time, water pouring
away. That attitude that I remember,
not even considering it, even thinking
about it, you might as well leave the tap
on because someone was going to use it
at some point. And the guys nowadays
are much more perceptive to you
saying, ‘do you know how much water
is going down the drain?’
They’re much easier to convince
than I would have been 20 years ago,
so I think the battle is half way there
anyway, it’s just keeping encouraging
that message every day. My old head
chef used to have see-through bin bags
and took the bin bags out to show you
everything wasted, and I still do that to
this day, and they’re receptive to it. It’s
just sometimes a friendly nudge in the
right direction.Martyn Clover says attitudes towards
kitchen energy wastage are improving.http://www.foodserviceequipmentjournal.com August 2019 | Foodservice Equipment Journal | 23
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