Food Waste Reduction in Oslo’ Restaurants: an approach toward Sustainability

Abstract

In the current era, the climate change and environmental sustainability are the most challenging issues and objectives. For this purpose, the sustainable development is required to combat climate change and to adapt environmental sustainability. So, organizational and businesses innovations for sustainable development can contribute in this battle. There is so much research which has already been done on the organizational innovations for sustainable development but, there is not much literature regarding businesses innovations to achieve sustainability especially in the restaurants businesses for the management and reduction of food wastage. The reduction of food waste in restaurants is very important to contribute to sustainable development in order to overcome climate change and environmental issues because; food waste has diverse negative environmental, social and economical consequences.

This thesis aims are to understand and find that, what are the reasons behind the food wastage in the restaurants of Oslo and making strategies and finding out the practices through which the restaurants of Oslo can reduce the food wastage if they implement those strategies and practices. There are ten interviews from ten different restaurants conducted for this thesis. The data collected through the semi-structured interviews provide the insight into the current state of food waste sources and thinking attitudes regarding food waste of the owners and management of the restaurants.

Although, all the restaurants implement some kind of practices and processes at a certain level to reduce the food waste in their respective businesses but it varies among the restaurants due to the knowledge and awareness of the owners and top management about the food waste’s impacts on the environment, society and economy. Polishing the professional and managerial abilities of the owners and management of the restaurants and educating them, making legislations and granting funds for food waste management at government level, staff training working in the kitchens in restaurants and making them aware and responsible for environment and society are the main factors that can trigger the processes for food waste reduction in restaurants.