How to Weigh a Week of Kitchen Waste
Sizing a machine on a guess is how a buyer ends up with the wrong one. Seven days, one set of scales, one sheet of paper.
How do you measure how much food waste a kitchen produces?
Weigh every bin before it leaves the kitchen, every day for 7 days, and record the time and the shift against each weight. A seven-day record captures weekday and weekend service patterns that a single day can miss. That swing decides which machine fits.
Use the week to understand ordinary and peak daily loads. Allow for holidays, seasonality and changes in occupancy before estimating a full year. One day will not do it. A kitchen’s output moves with its covers, and a banqueting Saturday is not a Tuesday.
- Weigh the empty bin first, or tare the scales. Subtract that empty-bin weight from every full-bin reading so you record food waste only.
- Write the time and the shift beside each weight, on the same sheet.
- Do it every day for seven days, so the weekday-to-weekend swing is in the figures and not in somebody’s memory.
- Add the seven days up. Record each day's total and the busiest shift as well as the weekly total; a weekly average alone can hide a peak.
- Bring the sheet to the sizing conversation. You are now working from your own number instead of a borrowed one.
Your own records show how weekday and weekend loads differ. Keep each day’s figure as well as the weekly total, and tell us about banquets, holidays or seasonal changes that a single week may miss.
