Now more than ever, consumers are aware of cleanliness and, along with this, environmental impact is having an increasingly bigger influence on their purchasing decisions. When eating out or taking away, the way your business manages its waste, keeps work areas clean and runs an eco-friendly environment, makes a big difference. This means a clean environment and a sustainable way of working is crucial and can make the difference between a sale or a customer walking away. So, how can you make your business more sustainable, maintain high cleanliness and improve your customer journey? Here we give you some easy ways to impress customers by sticking to cleanliness and wasting less:

Food waste is, of course, one of the biggest sources of waste from a restaurant. Around 40% of food waste produced by a restaurant finds its way into landfill. This should be cut down wherever possible. To make use of leftover food, try selling meals at a discounted rate to hungry customers, working with smaller portions or finding creative ways of making new meals out of what you've got left.

Conserve Water

One of the easiest ways to help the environment is by conserving water. There are many ways that this can be achieved in a restaurant setting. This includes installing low flow taps and other water-conserving devices. These cost money upfront, but are worth the investment in the long-run. One of the best, free water-saving techniques is to turn off taps while doing a task. This may involve re-educating your staff about how they can change their working practises, so that collectively you can reduce water waste in a way that's simple and effective.

Recycling

There has been a huge push on recycling for years, however, this has mainly been focused on people at home. There is still plenty that businesses can do to recycle. Restaurants produce a huge amount of packaging waste and other waste on a day-to-day basis. Ensure that your restaurant recycles materials, including plastic cartons, cardboard boxes and glass bottles. An increasing number of suppliers are popping up providing products with recyclable and biodegradable packaging. See if you can switch supplier to waste less packaging and boost your eco-friendly rating further within your business. Get in touch with your waste management company and see if you can set up a specific recycling collection. Work with your team to devise a system to sort out your waste every week and put it out for collection.

Switch Off Appliances

This is a common practice that several businesses engage in, but restaurants are particularly guilty of doing it. Appliances are left on all the time when they're not being used. This is unnecessary and wasteful. What’s more, it costs more money. Reducing your energy costs will not only help the environment, but makes for a much better bank balance as well. So, make sure that you instruct your staff to turn things off when not in use. Also, make sure that you turn off the lights when they're not needed either. Simple things like this will save energy and costs of bills.

Clean Your Appliances

This one is overlooked but very important, especially in this environment - but think about it like this. How many appliances are there in your kitchen? A lot. If they're not regularly cleaned, then they're not going to be as efficient as they were when new and they're the number one reason germs spread through the kitchen. Also, the dirt build-up makes the machine break down more quickly, meaning they take longer to run and cost you more in energy. Keep your appliances clean. An action as simple as wiping the door seal of your fridge can make it return to peak efficiency. Continuing with high standards of cleanliness is vital, so maintaining cleaner kitchens and add more programmes to implement this.