08.06.2021.
The workshop on reducing food waste in hotels was held today for the staff of the Park Plaza Histria Hotel in Pula, organised the Environmental Protection and Energy Efficiency Fund.This is the second workshop for hotels aimed at preventing food waste. The workshops are implemented under the pilot project “Reduce Food Waste #cookforyourguests”, which includes one hotel in Pula and the second one in Osijek.
“With this project we will implement work methods aimed at reducing food waste in the hotel kitchen. We will measure waste quantities in different phases and offer the solutions on how to reduce the biowaste, which is key for us, and large quantities of which end up on landfills. This is why this education is so important, and in cooperation with the hotel staff we will carry out measurements that will start next week in cooperation with the Environmental Engineering Institute at the Faculty of Geotechnical Engineering of the University in Zagreb“, said the head of the EU Funds Sector at the Fund, Maja Feketić.
The hotel sector is one of the most important stakeholders in tourism with a significant environmental impact, and the transition to the green business operation is inevitable. “Through this project, the Fund will develop a guide for hotels about the methods for reducing food waste and proper disposal of waste, so that the guidelines and useful advice can be applied in practice and yield tangible results. We have also prepared communication materials for guests in the form of simple messages as a straightforward reminder how to treat food correctly,” said the project coordinator from the Fund, Vesna Cetin Krnjević.
The workshop for the hotel staff was held by an expert in the field of preventing food waste Branka Ilakovac, PhD, who presented a number of good practice examples and analyses of different hotel chains that were operating on this principle. “When we have a food management plan, we buy only what is necessary, we properly store the groceries, and estimate the size of meals realistically – then throwing away food is reduced to a minimum. The key strategies for reducing food waste are aimed at measuring food waste, efforts by the hotel staff, reviewing the offers, reducing excess food preparation, and repurposing of the surplus,” pointed out Mrs Ilakovac in today’s workshop.
The marketing and sales director and member of the Board of the Pula tourism company Arena Hospitality Group, Manuela Kraljević, and the manager of Hotel Histria Tomislav Korošec, expressed appreciation that the project was being implemented in their hotel, which they wanted to make even greener and achieve even better results by applying the agreed methods for reducing waste.
This pilot project is implemented by the Fund together with the Ministry of Economy and Sustainable Development and the Ministry of Tourism and Sports. It marks the starting point for collecting the information and data that will help develop the most acceptable methods, so that next year an extensive project at national level could be prepared, which would include the kitchens in all kinds of institutions, not only hotels.
