How to make buffet breakfasts less wasteful

BREAKFAST IS THE most important meal of the day, and how it is served matters, too. Take the classic hotel buffet breakfast. Or, maybe, don’t: when people do, they take much more than they eat. Compared with ordering from the menu, all-you-can-eat breakfasts waste more food—up to twice as much, according to one study. This all amounts to a problem for the environment and the bottom line of hotels.

Experts have puzzled for years over how to encourage eaters to show a little restraint. Now researchers in Norway and Italy have cooked up a new idea. They have built a virtual breakfast buffet populated with simulated guests and are using it to find the best strategies to make buffet-goers leave behind fewer leftovers.

Hotel guests go hog-wild for a variety of reasons, many of which have little to do with hunger. Cultural and environmental influences dominate buffet decision-making. Previous research has found that factors which influence how much ends up in the bin range from nationality (Russians wasted the most; Austrians the least) and age (children have bigger eyes than stomachs) to the size of the plates (radius correlates with waste). The passive-aggressive signs perched on some buffet tables imploring guests to take only what they know they will polish off have been shown to increase the piles of leftovers.

To simplify matters, researchers at NORCE, an independent research institute in Kristiansand, and their colleagues at the University of Bologna settled on four main motivations guiding their model’s buffet buffs: peckishness, the desire to live sustainably, social pressure and self-control. They then overlaid external drivers that turned those motives into behaviour. These altered variables such as the duration of the buffet, the size of plates and the diversity of food on offer.

Virtual guests could visit the buffet tables as often as they liked, within the time each had available. (Some were categorised as business guests and had to leave sooner than those on holiday, who could graze for up to three hours.) The researchers’ goal was to see which combinations of motivations and drivers had the biggest impact on the amount of waste produced. To validate aspects of the model, the team used data collected from real breakfast buffets in eight Norwegian hotels during the spring and summer of 2023.

After hundreds of runs the model suggested the most important influence in limiting waste was, unsurprisingly, someone’s attitude to sustainability. Conformism, too, was influential: people are more likely to overindulge if they believe others will. Plate size was the most important of the external drivers: although the people in the model with both small and large plates went back for more, those with smaller plates tended to finish what they took. How long guests were allowed to stick around and what food they could enjoy had less of an impact.

Hotels could use the virtual buffet to minimise food waste, and the money wasted as a result. They could try different food layouts or see what happens if plates were 20% smaller, for example. They could also work out exactly how those irritating signs could be rewritten to have the most useful effect given a hotelier’s typical clientele.

This work is just the starter, stresses Ivan Puga-Gonzalez of NORCE. The project is part of a larger European effort to reduce food waste called Changing Practices and Habits through Open, Responsible and Social Innovation towards Zero Food Waste (CHORIZO). He and his team are now using the model to test interventions in the real world. Travellers be advised: the next time you opt for seconds, you may be helping science, too. ■