When people think about food waste at conferences, they usually picture the buffet after lunch. Full trays of food, half-eaten plates, and wondering what happens to everything that’s left over.
The reality is, by the time attendees are eating, most of the decisions that affect food waste have already been made.
Over the years, MeetGreen has had the opportunity to work with organizations like ReFED and CleanMed. They approach food waste a little differently, but both have taught me the same thing: it starts long before the first meal is served.
Data is the Key to Preventing Food Waste
Data is one of our biggest tools. We look at what happened at previous events: which meals were well attended, which ones weren’t, and whether attendance typically drops on the last morning because people have already started heading to the airport. Those trends help us work with the venue to order more accurately instead of just planning for every registered attendee.
Going a Step Further
CleanMed goes a step further. At registration, they ask attendees which meals they won’t be attending. Arriving after breakfast? Leaving before lunch on the last day? That’s useful information. It doesn’t seem like much on its own, but multiply it across a few thousand attendees, and it starts to matter.
Menu Planning is Key
The menu matters, too. Before the event, they sit down with the chef to discuss options to avoid food waste. Here are some examples:
- Can these ingredients work across a couple of different meals?
- Does it make sense to pre-set the salads and bread, or hold off?
- What can safely get held over for a later break instead of prepping something new?
What Happens During the Event
Once the event is underway, they watch what’s getting eaten. If there are still plenty of bagels and pastries sitting from breakfast, those become the afternoon snack instead of ordering more.
What You Should Keep In Mind Before the Event
But there’s another side to food waste that happens before any of this. What food are they serving in the first place?
Aaron Elliott, our Senior Sustainability Consultant, pointed this out when we were talking about ReFED. “About 65% of the menu was vegan or vegetarian, and they served no beef.” That’s important because the impact of food starts long before it reaches the conference. What they choose to put on the menu affects the energy, water, and other resources used to produce it.
ReFED also hit an 85% consumption rate, and whatever wasn’t served to attendees was eaten onsite by hotel staff. So, they really are looking at food from both directions: what they are serving and what happens to it once it’s there.
Where Should Left Over Food Go?
Even with good planning, some food may be left over. They ask the venue about donation options early; many hotels already have relationships with local nonprofits or food recovery groups, and some will send leftovers to the employee cafeteria if nothing else is set up. If neither exists, there’s still time to find a local organization before the event, and that’s a much easier conversation to have in the planning stage than right after lunch wraps.
It’s About Paying Attention
Both ReFED and CleanMed think about the whole food system. CleanMed built waste reduction into the attendee experience itself, starting at registration. Sometimes the coolest things our clients do aren’t flashy. They’re just people paying closer attention than most.
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