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You scrape plates and bin trimmings every night, and it quietly adds up to 1,080.00 £ a month.

How much money do I lose each month from the food I throw away in my restaurant?

Your monthly loss is the kilos of food you throw away in a month times what that food cost you per kilo, plus the monthly fee to collect the waste. Weigh your bins for one normal week, divide by 7, multiply by the days you open each month, then by the cost per kilo. The staff time, energy and water spent on that food come on top of this figure.

Updated on 23 September 2026

Run it with your own numbers

Change any number below: the result updates while you type.

Kilos of food thrown away in one normal week (weigh your bins) kg Days you are open each month days What that food cost you per kilo, on average £/kg Monthly fee to have your food waste collected £

Money lost on thrown-away food each month

1,080.00 £

This is money you already paid for and then put in the bin, every month.

Kilos of food thrown away each month240.0 kgThis is how much food leaves your kitchen as rubbish instead of on a plate.

Money lost on thrown-away food over a year12,960.00 £This is what a year of waste costs you if nothing changes.

The maths is done. Now Oravio can tell you what to do with it.

Create your free account: the moment you are in, Oravio picks up from these numbers — yours, not the example ones — and tells you what to do next. The conversation stays yours: it is there when you come back.

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How it is calculated

Weigh everything you throw away for one or two normal weeks.
Keep three bins: food that went off, prep trimmings, and leftovers from plates.
Divide the weekly kilos by 7 to get the kilos per day.
Multiply by the days you open each month to get the kilos per month.
Multiply the monthly kilos by what the food cost you per kilo, using your invoices and recipe costs.
Add the monthly fee you pay to have the waste taken away.

Money lost on thrown-away food each month = Kilos of food thrown away in one normal week (weigh your bins) ÷ 7 × Days you are open each month × What that food cost you per kilo, on average + Monthly fee to have your food waste collected
Kilos of food thrown away each month = Kilos of food thrown away in one normal week (weigh your bins) ÷ 7 × Days you are open each month
Money lost on thrown-away food over a year = Money lost on thrown-away food each month × 12

An example

Kilos of food thrown away in one normal week (weigh your bins): 56 kg · Days you are open each month: 30 days · What that food cost you per kilo, on average: 4 £/kg · Monthly fee to have your food waste collected: 120 £.

Result: Money lost on thrown-away food each month: 1,080.00 £ · Kilos of food thrown away each month: 240.0 kg · Money lost on thrown-away food over a year: 12,960.00 £.

Worth keeping in mind

Use your own weighing, not a guess: a sector average is only a rough guide.
Pick a normal week to weigh, not a holiday rush or a very quiet week.
This leaves out staff time, energy and water spent on the wasted food, so the true cost is higher.
Enter prices and fees in your own currency: the pound sign is only for the example.
Studied restaurants that measured waste and trained staff cut kitchen waste by about a quarter in year one.

Sources

Text drafted with the assistance of artificial intelligence, from the sources listed, and checked against the worked example. It is a tool for orientation: for tax or contractual decisions, your accountant has the last word.

How this page came about

Nobody wrote it by hand. Oravio built it on its own.

It looked for the sources and opened them one by one: the ones that do not answer never get in.
It wrote the formulas and tried them on a worked example: if the maths does not add up, the page never goes out.
It laid the page out and put it online all by itself, with nobody touching a key.

It is the same work it does for the people who use it: you say what you need in plain words, and it gets done while you are doing something else. A page like this one, on your own numbers, included.

And from here on, without you asking again

Every month Oravio will redo this sum with your new weigh-ins and supplier prices, show you how the loss moved against last month, and warn you when it climbs above the level you set.

This page is one thing out of hundreds. Oravio lives on your own server, on your computer, phone and tablet: it remembers for years, works at night and keeps doing your jobs while you do something else. It takes a minute to switch on.

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