trolley food waste

Hey there!

So far, I've been talking mainly about how food waste comes from households, firms, supermarkets etc (well, you get the general idea). But did you know that trolley food in hospitals are also included in food wastes? I came across this article and I thought it was quite insightful!!

In a study, it has indicated that "trolley food waste generation is a practice embedded within the limitations related to the procedures of meal ordering."

Trolley meal service is  a service whereby patients choose their meals directly from the food trolley and are served by healthcare personnel. Although this practice might improve patients' food intakes due to the customized approach, this practice can unintentionally lead to food waste problems. The unserved food remaining on the trolley wastes between 17-50% of bulk food from the kitchen, constituting as much as 30% of total food waste.

Problems include

• meal ordering - have to order in advance, but difficult to estimate the exact number of patients in the ward
• communication - problem of patients' schedules
• portion sizes - lack of flexibility 
• monitoring - no satellite kitchen, lack of monitoring on trolley food waste

Solutions? I feel that the hospital menu could be improved by providing the actual portion size, nutritional information etc for the patients so that they are able to make more informed decisions whenever they pick their meals. This allows patients to request a smaller/larger portion, or whether to omit certain ingredients in their meals - basically to allow more flexibility in the dishes. However, this solution might not be easy as the portion sizes depends of the intuitive skills of the serving staff, and the portion sizes might not be consistent for each patient.

Additionally, it is important for the staff to know the implications of food waste. Better equipment and tools such as computerized weighing scales with scanners and digital cameras can be used to track food waste data. For the unserved food, maybe it could be served to staff or for the patients' visitors, this can help to reduce food waste :)

K.T. OFEI, et al. (2014) How practice contributes to trolley food waste. A qualitative study among staff involved in serving meals to hospital patients. [Online] 83 (12). Available from: http://www.sciencedirect.com.libproxy1.nus.edu.sg/science/article/pii/S0195666314003985 [Accessed: 24/10/2015]