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The COVID-19 pandemic revealed how widespread food insecurity is around the world. But did you know that 30% of global food production is wasted? Meeting planners are as aware as the rest of society about food insecurity, which is why it’s so important to review the facts about donating event leftovers to a community kitchen—something that is “well within the bounds of an organization like Marriott,” says Amy Bourne, Marriott’s senior manager, sustainability and supplier diversity.
Perhaps more important is to dig into how to reduce food waste in the first place, Bourne says. But first, a look back.
The Bill Emerson Good Samaritan Food Donation Act
Many meeting planners may still be operating under the erroneous belief that legal concerns bar them from donating leftovers and surplus food from their events to a community kitchen. But, as Bourne points out, that’s just not true. The 1996 Bill Emerson Food Donation Act established federal protection in the United States from civil and criminal liability for persons involved in the donation and distribution of food and grocery products to needy individuals when certain criteria are met. Criteria include certain safety protocols like packaging and food storage temperature. Outside of the U.S., meeting planners should check with their country and state laws and local public health officials to ensure compliance with local food donation requirements.
Ending Food Waste at Every Point
According to the World Wildlife Fund, about 11% of greenhouse gas emissions could be eliminated if food waste were brought to zero. (Aviation, by comparison, accounts for 2% of global emissions.) Donating leftovers is a positive step toward that, but it’s not a perfect solution to food waste. Enter Marriott’s Serve 360 commitment to creating positive and sustainable impact wherever the company does business. One of Serve 360’s goals is to slash food waste to landfill in half by 2025.
What does this look like in practice? In addition to ensuring food waste is not generated in the first place through improved planning and purchasing decisions, there are creative ways to prevent food waste from entering landfills. Let’s say there’s sliced watermelon on a buffet. Some properties have developed tasty recipes to turn the rind into candies that can be left in guestrooms. Another fun use for food waste? Banana peels can be dehydrated into jerky, as they have been at some of Marriott’s European properties. In 2021, the JW Marriott Hotel Bangkok transformed used coffee granules into an enticing (free!) body scrub for guests, and 14.2 tons of fruit and vegetable peels from the property were donated to a local farm for animal feed.

How to Make a Donation
What if, despite your best intentions and carefully planned ordering, your meeting still has leftovers? Bourne says there are several apps that make food donation easy by picking up leftovers from meetings. Some of these include (in the United States): <a href="https://apps.apple.com/us/app/chow-match/id1091954512">Chow Match</a>, <a href="https://apps.apple.com/au/app/copia/id1563996344">Copia</a>, <a href="https://apps.apple.com/us/app/food-finders/id1483853305">Food Finders</a>, <a href="https://apps.apple.com/us/app/mealconnect/id1230097075">MealConnect</a>, and, in the U.K., <a href="https://apps.apple.com/gb/app/too-good-to-go-end-food-waste/id1060683933">Too Good to Go</a>.
The Future of Food Waste
“Beyond our 50% reduction goal, globally, by 2025, we are continuing our work with external partners like the World Wildlife Fund,” Bourne says. One successful program that Marriott is proud to share with its hotels is hotelkitchen.org, an online toolkit that full-service hotels and food service institutions, including restaurants, cruises, and catering companies, can use to learn more strategies for reducing food waste. The toolkit was produced via a collaboration between the World Wildlife Fund (WWF), the American Hotel &amp; Lodging Association (AHLA), and the Rockefeller Foundation, with contributions from Marriott International.

“We encourage our hotels to first and foremost prevent food waste where feasible and then entertain multiple options to ensure waste does not end up in landfills.” 

Regardless of whether it’s donating food, repurposing scraps, or other diversion options such as composting, meeting planners have a responsibility to think not just about what guests will eat, but how those meals will impact the earth.

Global

Marriott’s Senior Manager of Sustainability Explains How to Whittle Down Food Waste.

How to Manage Leftovers From Your Meeting

Over the last decade, the meetings industry has made major strides in embracing sustainable food and beverage options. Enter COVID-19, and a new world of hurdles.
COVID-19 isn’t a foodborne illness, but with social distancing in place, meeting planners turned to individual food and beverage packaging as a precautionary measure. Doing so helped alleviate stress from attendees. It also added up to a lot of waste.
So how can planners soothe people’s nerves about coronavirus-era dining while staying economically and environmentally efficient? Denise Naguib, global vice president, sustainability and supplier diversity at Marriott International, suggests tackling this challenge one step at a time.

“Think about: ‘What is one change I can make at this meeting? It’s not just about taking it all on, but thinking about one at a time, making the change and communicating effectively.”

Use these tips to help you choose individually packaged items that do the least amount of damage to the planet.
Think single-serve, not just single-use.
Individually packaged food and beverage is meant to serve one person at one time. But that doesn’t have to mean disposable, single-use packaging options.
For example, you can reduce waste by serving lunch in reusable, plastic clamshell containers or bento boxes. The same packaging can be washed, sanitized, and repurposed for lunch service on the second day of your event.

Gift individual, reusable water bottles.
In the spirit of single-serve, consider gifting reusable water bottles. Not in your budget? Share your environmental goal with your partners and vendors and see if any of them would be willing to donate branded canisters to your event.
Communicate your goals to attendees, too—let them know that the water bottles are more than just free swag, it’s also an opportunity to reduce waste. Naguib says to remember that thinking sustainably is a change for many people. “To act differently and carry their water bottles around, having refilling stations, that is a step,” she says. Layering in one change like this, one meeting at a time, not only makes it less overwhelming for you and your guests, but it also allows for a feedback loop.
“Get that feedback and insight from your own attendees to see what’s working, what’s not working, and cull ideas from them,” Naguib says.

Consider the materials.
There are ample sustainable packaging options—the trick is to find one that’s within your budget. Here are some considerations to keep in mind as you navigate what is and isn’t feasible for your next meeting.
<ul>
 <li>Glass containers for food and beverages are 100% reusable but are not always recyclable in many communities. While glass bottles (for, say, soda or iced tea) may be the first idea that pops into your mind, this could be the time to bring out your mason jars for easy pre-batching.</li>
 <li>Though paper packaging for food can be tricky to recycle, if you select paper packaging made from recycled paper, you are still reducing waste by not creating products from new materials.</li>
 <li>Metal vessels such as aluminum and stainless steel are highly reusable and readily recyclable. Opt for reusable jars or recyclable cans.</li>
 <li>When using plastic packaging, familiarize yourself with the <a href="https://www.goodhousekeeping.com/home/g804/recycling-symbols-plastics-460321/">recycling symbols</a> and make sure the recycling facilities in your meeting’s region accept that type of plastic. And avoid plastics with bisphenol A when you can.</li>
 <li>For single-use items such as straws, consider options made from biodegradable materials like paper.</li>
</ul>
Think outside the container.
Individually packaged items don’t necessarily need to be boxed or bottled. Wine glasses can be used to <a href="https://www.bizbash.com/catering-design/food-trends/media-gallery/21319420/15-lowtouch-hightaste-catering-ideas-for-live-and-virtual-events">serve starter salads</a>, and metal cutlery can be individually wrapped with cloth napkins instead of a sealed plastic pack.
And remember that individual items don’t all have to be inedible. Consider bread bowls for soup or ice cream cones to hold dessert candies. Keep an eye out for more <a href="https://www.azom.com/article.aspx?ArticleID=21377">edible packaging under development</a>, too.
Keep the big picture in mind.
As Naguib points out, communication is key. Work with your venue to place recycling and composting bins in a variety of strategic locations, and communicate these locations and your goals to everyone at your event. Additionally, make sure your recycling bins are clearly labeled, so there’s no confusion about which items can and cannot be placed inside.
If you’re reusing food and beverage packaging each day, make sure your attendees know how to use it. Create clear signage to show where water filling stations are located in your venue, or where to place materials meant to be sanitized and reused, such as mason jars and bento boxes. Doing these things will ensure everyone at your event feels safe while (re)introducing sustainability into your meeting’s mix.

Just because you’re serving individually packaged meals doesn’t mean your sustainability efforts are off the table.

Single-Serve Meals Can Be Sustainable Too 

Long live the buffet!
In a world suddenly hyperaware of germs, many have questioned if buffets can still be used to feed the masses. But at its heart, the buffet needs to live in order for meeting planners to accomplish their goals.
“You gather, sure, for the food and beverage, but you gather because your meeting has a purpose,” Dana Pellicano, Marriott’s vice president of U.S. and Canada food and beverage, told meeting planners at Marriott’s <a href="https://www.marriottbonvoyevents.com/tips-and-trends/article/327/marriott-s-the-exchange-brings-industry-leaders-together">The Exchange event</a> in August 2021. “You want to have rich content. You want to have time for networking. If you spend all your time trying to feed 400, 500 people à la carte, it certainly can reduce the amount of time you can spend meaningfully doing other things. So the buffet has long been a solution for volume foods. I don’t think that changes.”
COVID-19 is neither foodborne nor primarily passed through surface contact, but hesitancy might persist for many meeting professionals and attendees. Not that the coronavirus is the only concern around buffets. “If ever an area of food and beverage and the meetings experience was rife for intervention, it was definitely the buffet,” Pellicano said on an episode of <a href="https://www.northstarmeetingsgroup.com/Podcasts/The-Eventful-Podcast/food-beverage-trends">Eventful: The Podcast for Meeting Professionals</a>.
The buffet that Pellicano refers to as the “Battleship buffet”—a massive space purpose-built for buffet service, limiting its versatility—may indeed be dead, partly because of hygiene concerns, partly because designers are creating more elegant solutions to dining spaces. So how can planners feed their attendees in this new environment?
The “such is the state” bit was meant to transition from the “the buffet is dead, long live the buffet” contradiction. Without it, we recommend just being more straightforward.

Planners have already been experimenting with solutions, including staggering mealtimes, designing spaces to encourage optimal foot traffic, and offering boxed and other prepackaged meals. Here are a few more principles to play with:
● Offer creative stations. At its simplest, this can mean replacing one giant food station with four smaller ones spread throughout the space. At its more imaginative, this can mean converting a recreation space into a dining hall. One tantalizing example: At the <a href="https://www.marriottbonvoyevents.com/tour/HNMMC">Wailea Beach Resort–Marriott</a>, private floating cabanas have been turned into dining spaces.
● Keep the buffet, but optimize it. A staffed, one-sided buffet can come close to meeting the volume demands of a two-sided buffet while reducing crowd density. Staffing the buffet with servers has another benefit—reducing food waste (and cost), as portion sizes are more standardized.
● Remind people that they’re away from home. Strict lockdown measures are long gone, but people have still been spending more time at home. That gives planners an opportunity to dazzle. “I think perhaps people are really looking to say, ‘Hey, if I go out, I want an experience,’” Pellicano said on Eventful. “‘I want the best, I want something different, I want you to really wow me, I want a product that maybe I don’t get in my local store, so really show me something new and show me something that’s high-end and unexpected.” That doesn’t have to be at odds with sanitary needs. Pellicano points to ready-to-drink alcoholic beverages, such as premixed cocktails, which have seen a rise in quality in the past few years.
● Incorporate trends that grew in tandem with the pandemic. People’s relationship with food and health shifted along with attitudes toward public health, and your menus can reflect that. Consider adding items that keep pace with your attendees’ collective reckonings, such as plant-based meat alternatives and premium low- or no-alcohol beverages.
At its heart, the current rethinking of the buffet offers planners an opportunity. “I don’t see another way where we can meaningfully feed a whole bunch of people and get them on their way to their next really important general session without something in the buffet space,” Pellicano said at The Exchange. “But I sure hope we’re building better ones, smarter ones, more sustainable ones … and get folks through and where they need to go on time.”

COVID-19 brought a much-needed reconsideration of the buffet. Here are four things to think about as you brainstorm how to keep your attendees engaged with food and beverages.

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