Quantifying liquid food waste : levels of liquid coffee waste, its causes and barriers and drivers for quantification in the Swedish food service sector

Abstract: Food waste is a waste of resources required throughout the entire supply chain, leading to environmental impacts that could have been avoided. Coffee has a relatively high environmental impact partially due to the high consumption. To identify levels and sources of food waste, and consequently prevent it, quantification is used. Although liquid food waste is included in food waste definitions, the inclusion of the waste stream in quantification standards and previous research is limited. Today’s inadequate insight in liquid food waste generation makes it relevant to also recognise this waste stream in food waste definitions and thereby including it in quantifications. This study aimed to quantify the level of liquid coffee waste in the Swedish food service sector. Additionally, the causes of liquid coffee waste as well as drivers and barriers for quantifying it was investigated based on surveys and interviews with food services active in the sector. The results show that serving waste of coffee is on average 3.26 kg (95% CI: 2.5, 4.0) per day and entity, corresponding to approximately 10 % of all coffee produced, based on quantifications in six entities. This corresponds to 0.72 kg (95 % CI: 0.57, 0.88) of coffee waste per employee. If this is applied to a national context, the yearly serving waste of coffee is approximately 17 000 or 25 000 tonnes, depending on the assumptions made for scaling up the results. The causes leading to liquid coffee waste is business offer, difficulty in predicting consumption, lack of resources, production strategies and guest consumption patterns. The drivers motivating entities to quantify liquid coffee waste are demand from the organisation or industry, the potential cost-savings and resource efficiency it can provide, demand from guests and personal awareness. The barriers for quantification are team-structure, lack of resources, lack of credence in the problematics of coffee waste and entities considering the waste to be known, low or non-existent. Further quantifications of this kind are needed to confirm the findings of this study and to further investigate what contribution liquid food waste has in the total food waste generation.