An analysis of food waste from a flight catering business for sustainable food waste management: A case study of halal food production process

Abstract

The airline business is a capital-intensive industry that consumes a large amount of resources in order to provide its services. The provision of food for airline passengers demonstrates an unsustainable consumption and production pattern and food waste from flight catering poses a significant sustainability issue, not only because valuable caloric content is lost, but also the loss of land, water and energy required in the production of food. A conduct of literature review of food waste management in airline catering business revealed a lack of research in this area. Through a case study of Halal food production process, the research aims to identify the amount of food waste generated from Halal kitchen flight catering production process in order to identify food waste hotspots by conducting a food waste composition analysis, Material Flow Analysis and eco-efficiency analysis. It also endeavors to provide insights that can help organizations better understand the food waste generation and composition imperative to the establishment of food waste management policies and make informed decisions to ensure that the future growth is more sustainable. One of the goals of this research is to develop a recommendation for sustainable food waste management by promoting the most preferred approaches of sustainable food waste management, which can prevent and reduce food wastage at source instead of the least preferred approach, which is recovering energy before landfill disposal.This research found that vegetable wastes accounted for 40–50 percent of the total food generated in the operation. From the quantitative analyses, it is recommended that the company prioritize its efforts in reducing seafood waste due to relatively high impact the reduction in seafood wastes will have in terms of cost-savings potential. This can be achieved by designing menus and recipes that aim to utilize seafood efficiently in combination with starting a dialogue with airline customers on the benefits of food waste reduction. The material flow diagram clearly illustrates the hotspots in the halal production process. Although the meal portioning process did not generate the highest amount of food waste, but in terms of edibility, this process generated the highest amount of wasted food (edible parts). Measures should be established in order to address the inefficiencies in the resource use. The company can reduce vegetables waste by selecting high quality suppliers, improve the effectiveness of selection and quality control process by providing additional training, changing the washing process and investing in new technology that facilitate staff in their jobs.