There is growing evidence that a significant share of global food is thrown away, with concomitant detrimental repercussions for sustainability. Reducing food waste is a key sustainability challenge for the food service industry. Despite the significance of this issue to the global foodservice industry, the link between innovation practices and food waste management has received limited attention in the academic literature. This paper uses innovation management and social constructionism to investigate interrelationships of food service provisions and innovations in waste management. It is based on the evaluation of food waste solutions and innovations that combine strategic dimensions of waste management with practice-driven initiatives, including incremental (processes and technologies) and radical innovations. The paper presents a range of waste management initiatives, showing that their implementation in the foodservice sector varies depending on management’s beliefs, knowledge, goals and actions. The concepts discussed here could help practitioners to become more aware of the factors that drive the adoption of food waste innovations.

Introduction

Food waste is an ecological, economic and social problem. Every year some 1.3 billion tons of food are lost or wasted globally (FAO, 2013), representing a considerable share of the overall food produced (Lundqvist et al., 2008; Parfitt et al., 2010). Food wastage appears to be highest in developed countries (Buzby and Hyman, 2012), while on the other hand, there are an estimated 842 million people in poor countries experiencing chronic hunger (FAO, 2013). This raises the question as to whether food wastage could be reduced along food supply chains (Curtis and Slocum, 2016; Martinez-Sanchez et al., 2016; Muriana, 2017; Wilewska-Bien et al., 2016). In this paper, this is discussed for tourism, as a global food service industry, which is implicated in food consumption and waste generation (Betz et al., 2015). Focus is thus on the significant share of global food that is provided through food services in restaurants, fast food chains, cafés, cafeterias, canteens and dining halls, as well as event catering (Gössling et al., 2011; Hall and Gössling, 2013). The foodservice industry now employs more people than any single other retail business, including 14 million in the USA and 8 million in Europe (Euromonitor International, 2016) and serves billions of meals every year (Gössling et al., 2011). Therefore, the industry has a critical role in the global food waste challenge. Food providers in gastronomy, catering and hospitality have recently come under increasing scrutiny over their food management practices, and specifically food waste, with evidence that considerable amounts of food are thrown away during preparation, or because they cannot be stored and reused (Betz et al., 2015; Hall and Gössling, 2013; Silvennoinen et al., 2015). Waste management has thus become a key priority, referring to all the activities related to avoiding, reducing or recycling waste, throughout the production and consumption chain (Papargyropoulou et al., 2016). While there is a plethora of literature examining the antecedents affecting food waste management decisions (Arvanitoyannis, 2010; Bloom, 2010; Demen Meier et al., 2015; Hall and Gössling, 2013; Siorak et al., 2015), there have been limited investigations into the various practices and stages of waste innovation adoption by food service providers. This paper aims to examine two established theoretical paradigms jointly, facilitating an understanding of not only the several food waste innovations but also managers’ propensity to adopt innovation. It is becoming increasingly evident that a waste management program, and especially a waste treatment innovation, that ignores social aspects of management and professional skills, is prone to failure (Heikkilä et al., 2016). This can be a barrier to the effective implementation of food waste innovations.