Daily Briefings to Reduce Food Waste at Bob & Pete’s

The challenge

Each year, more than 319,400 tonnes of good-quality food is wasted across the Australian bread and bakery value chain, from farm to consumers’ plates. This includes grain wasted in primary production, food materials wasted in bakeries, unsold products in retail, and uneaten bread and bakery products in Australian homes.

Food waste costs the Australian economy $36.6 billion a year, with significant costs worn by businesses, households, and the environment (FIAL, 2022).
The fast-paced nature of this industry means that considering wastage for the day and identifying opportunities to reduce this wastage is often missed. Reporting value loss at daily briefings provides the opportunity to stop, reflect and improve processes.

The opportunity

Bob & Pete’s are a leading supplier to cafes, restaurants, caterers and retailers across New South Wales. Bob & Pete’s does all its baking in-house. Their bread baking process is lean and produces low amounts of waste. However, there is still waste generated during the baking process. For example, when product does not meet specifications, or batch sizes do not align with the required amounts to make a product.

The company identified an opportunity to reduce bakery waste by communicating waste to production staff and involving them in the waste minimisation problem solving process.

The solution

Bob & Pete’s have changed how food ‘waste’ is communicated with production staff, resulting in an estimated 6.5% reduction in Operations waste (almost four tonnes per year). They do this through daily briefings on the lost value of waste.

The steps involved are:

1. Each day the cost of waste for the day is estimated. For example, $100 of ingredients in were wasted.
2. During the daily briefing the operations manager communicates the value loss to production staff.
3. Staff question why this happened and where the lost dollars (waste) was generated. This helps identify where to focus efforts to reduce waste. Staff then work together to find ways to prevent this from repeating.
4. After some time, a ‘good day’ is easier to identify as there will be less value lost reported.

The process is not intended to point fingers, rather identify systemic issues that can be improved together. The daily briefings increase staff knowledge of waste and can be used to gain insights from staff on opportunities to reduce waste. This initiative is in its early stages. As a next step, Bob and Pete’s is considering setting daily waste/value loss targets.

The learnings

By transferring food waste to lost dollars for the business, staff can better understand the opportunity to improve practices, and it is easier to see improvement (e.g. one day there was $1000 lost, today there is only $300 lost, tomorrow only $50 etc). Lost dollars is a more relatable metric than lost kilograms, batches, or units.

The Baking Association of Australia released the “Don’t Waste Your Dough” toolkit including key learnings like this from the Bread and Bakery Sector Action Plan. It provides a guide and easy to implement actions the industry can take today to reduce food waste, save money and minimise environmental impact.

This case study was prepared as part of the Bread and Bakery Sector Action Plan to help the sector reduce food waste. The project was initiated by End Food Waste Australia with funding support from NSW Environmental Protection Agency. It was delivered by Rawtec with input from bread and bakery industry partners. For more information visit www.endfoodwaste.com.au/sector-action-plans