Meet the chef with no bin in his kitchen

Meredith Marin, Founder & CEO of Vegan Hospitality, speaks to Vojtech Vegh, a world-famous zero-waste and plant-based chef, and the author of Surplus, a food waste guide for chefs.

Vojtech Vegh is the founder of the world’s first zero-waste and vegan restaurant. Vojtech inspires chefs to reconsider the ways in which they interact with ingredients, and through his chef training course, teaches the skills needed to create low waste and zero waste kitchens.

Meredith Marin: What is the difference between reducing and preventing food waste?

VV: The difference is that if I’m only focused on the reduction of food waste then that means that the creation of that food waste still happens, the food waste is continuously being created and I only look at it once it has been created. But that needs to shift into: how can I prevent it, what can I do in my process, in my system that would stop me from creating that food waste in the first place, because when the prevention is there, the reduction is not needed anymore.

MM: In your book you talk about how in your restaurant you didn’t have a waste bin. Could you share how you made that possible?

VV: Well, it was designed that way from the very beginning. I spent multiple years planning that process and I did want it to go that level of extreme of not even having a bin in the kitchen. But a couple of weeks in, we needed to add a small organic compost bin for the permaculture farm, because essentially, we had the kind of a food waste that wasn’t safe to consume for humans, and these had to go somewhere, so we had a small organic bin, but that was the only bin we had.

MM: I imagine that having no bins forces you to create solutions.

VV: Yes, it forced you to think about that waste way before you created it because if you already had a handful of food waste, then it was too late to think about it. It wasn’t going into the bin because there wasn’t any, so you really needed to plan every step and every process in your kitchen to make sure there was nothing left at the end of it.

MM: Can you tell us about the ‘black truffle mindset’ and why this is so important?

VV: The ‘black truffle mindset’ is a term I came up with to say that we all have a zero-waste mindset by default, we all know how to make the most of one ingredient at any time. And the reason I use the black truffle as an example is that you know how the black truffle is treated when it comes into the kitchen. You know it’s stored perfectly in perfect conditions; it has a special place in the fridge, the special container when you work with it. When you use it or when you shave it over the plate, you make sure you go and pick up every little crumb. When you have the tiny bit left over at the end, you don’t just chuck it in a bin. You use every tiny gram of the black truffle. It goes into infusions, it goes into the sauce, it gets used somewhere, it’s stored for something.So it’s the perfect example of having a zero-waste mindset in the kitchen. But what if we apply that zero-waste mindset to every ingredient that we work with. What if I look at carrots and lettuce and potatoes like black truffles? What if I would treat them the same way? We already know how to do it; we’re just not doing it with every ingredient.

MM: Why do you think that people aren’t doing that with every ingredient?

VV: We are biased with the cost of the ingredients because the black truffle is so expensive per kilogram, much more expensive than carrots. But then the question is how many black truffles do you use in a year and how many carrots do you use in a year? If you consistently waste 10 or 15% of every kilogram of carrots that you touch in the kitchen throughout the year, it’s easily going to add up to the same cost as wasting the crumbs of the black truffles. It’s completely unacceptable for us to waste a small bit of black truffle, but it’s acceptable to trim off unnecessary amounts of other produce because we think it’s cheaper, but that’s usually not true.

MM: What’s one common challenge that large kitchen teams face when trying to minimise food waste and how do you help them overcome that challenge?

VV: The most common challenge is communication and having everyone on the same page. You really need to set up a system in how you are going to communicate the change and how you are going to implement it. And the only answer to that is creating a system, is to have a rule and making it mandatory. You already have rules and mandatory systems in your kitchen, but they are not applied to food waste. We all have HACCP procedures that are mandatory. It’s communicated clearly in the kitchen, on every door and at every step, but the food waste prevention is not. It’s ‘we do it when we have time’, or one guy is more passionate than the other, and then you have inconsistent results. There has to be a system in place, there has to be a step-by-step plan of what exactly is going to happen, what is the new procedure, how are we creating dishes, how we will work with ingredients, how we will store those ingredients, how we treat them, how we extend their shelf life etc. And it doesn’t have to happen all in one day, of course, but it’s very important to have a system in place that is clearly communicated across the whole team, and not only the chefs and the kitchen team but also the F&B and the front of house team to make sure that everyone understands what the goal is that we are working towards and how are actually going to get there.

MM: What is the first step that a chef or an F&B director should take if they’re interested in preventing or reducing food waste in their kitchen?

VV: You have got to measure your food waste first in some way. 100% of the time it is underestimated how much food is in your bin. You must have an idea of what creates your food waste. Does it come from the front of house, is it because of the unfinished plates because of overly large portions, is it the kitchen waste, is it preparation waste? Do we have excessive spoilage in the fridge because of wrong ways of storage, are we over producing something unnecessarily, are there too many components on the a la carte menu? Which stream creates your food waste? And then you need to zoom in on that. You don’t start with what’s easiest to do, you start with the largest contributor to your food waste, what’s going to make the biggest impact. Because it’s so easy to get hooked on all these cool ideas, like I’m going to ferment this, make dehydrated that, but if you are only reducing a handful of waste on a daily basis and on the other end of the kitchen you are wasting 100kg of potato peels, that has absolutely no impact. It does not matter that you saved your parsley stem for pickling if some other guy next to you is wasting 100kg of potatoes.

MM: What is your favourite vegetable and what do you like to do with it?

VV: I love so many vegetables. I love broccoli and I love cauliflower as well, and one of the reasons why it’s my favourite and also most of the time I use it as an example is because it has parts that are so often wasted and not used, like the cauliflower leaves. There is so much nutrition in them. The same with the broccoli stalk, there is so much nutritional flavouring that is much better than the broccoli themselves.

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