Costa Cruises To Halve Food Waste On Board Its Ships
Costa Cruises has today unveiled its 4GOODFOOD program, whose aim is to halve food waste on board the Italian company’s ships by 2020.
The starting point for the project is recognizing the value of food. The food experience is a key part of the cruise and the relevant figures are quite staggering: some 54 million meals a year are prepared on board the members of the Costa fleet.
By means of 4GOODFOOD, Costa decided to review all its food service processes and remodel them using an integrated approach based on sustainability while ensuring the proactive engagement of guests and crew. The company is not working alone on 4GOODFOOD; indeed, it can count on the collaboration of Italian and international partners with a proven track record such as Fondazione Banco Alimentare ONLUS, Cittadinanzattiva, the Slow Food Foundation for Biodiversity, Università degli Studi di Scienze Gastronomiche di Pollenzo and Winnow.
The pilot project was successfully developed and tested on the flagship Costa Diadema starting in 2016 and 4GOODFOOD is now being implemented fleetwide. During the experimental phase on board the Costa Diadema, the program yielded impressive results with a more than 50% reduction in food waste in 11 months: this is equivalent to a saving of 1189 metric tons of CO2, namely the emissions of 231 motor vehicles in a year.
In any event, Costa Cruises’ ships were well placed from the outset with regard to food waste. According to a report entitled “Overview of waste in the UK Hospitality and food sector” produced by WRAP (the Waste & Resources Action Programme, world leaders in helping organizations achieve greater resource efficiency), the average shorebased restaurant wastes 284 grams of food per person per meal. This compares to the 216 grams measured on the Costa fleet prior to the launch of the 4GOODFOOD program.
Food waste is a key global issue: the UN 2030 Agenda lays down 17 Sustainable Development Goals, one of which is precisely to halve per capita global food waste by 2030. According to FAO, roughly one third of the food produced in the world every year — approximately 1.3 billion metric tons — gets lost or wasted.
4GOODFOOD is a far-reaching project that considers every aspect of food preparation and consumption on board and provides tangible and measurable solutions. In partnership with the Università di Scienze Gastronomiche di Pollenzo (University of Gastronomic Sciences), Costa began by remodeling its food&wine offerings based on sustainability and the rigorous selection of quality products and ingredients while prioritizing the seasonal availability and local sourcing of produce. This included the introduction of 572 regional and local dishes reflecting Italy’s unrivalled culinary heritage and the Mediterranean Diet.
Together with Winnow, specialists in optimization of processes in professional kitchens, Costa placed kitchen scales in the galleys and kept a centralized record enabling the mapping, quantification and analysis of wastage at food processing and preparation level. This system has enabled the gradual implementation of integrated improvement actions on board the ships, and it is already in use on more than half the fleet. Key to this was the specific training of almost 2400 galley staff, who were instructed on how to reduce waste and apply more sustainable processes.
