When travelers at Bali’s Desa Potato Head order cups of coffee brewed from the island’s famed beans, the leftover grounds don’t go in the trash—or even the compost. Instead, used grounds are saved for recycling, to then be infused into liqueur at the bar or fermented into sweet-tart kombucha.
“There are a lot of different techniques you can apply to extract more flavor,” says Felix Shoener, a research-and-development chef who uses fermentation, dehydration, and pickling to maximize otherwise compost-bound ingredients on “upcycled menus” at the beachfront property’s six restaurants. Fish scales are kneaded into crackers at the zero-waste Ijen Restaurant; watermelon rinds become crisp pickles complementing char-grilled king prawn at Indonesian-focused Kaum; Shoener has toasted and fermented leftover bread into miso for a range of dishes at Dome. By the end of the year, the resort says 25 percent of the food used in recipes across the property will be repurposed scraps.
“You just try to maximize ingredients,” says Shoener, who says his focus on cutting waste followed years of frustration at seeing food thrown out in high-end restaurants. And if fish-scale crackers haven’t yet gone mainstream, Desa Potato Head—where travelers can alternate between hedonistic club sets and “follow the waste” tours of on-site recycling and composting facilities—is just the vanguard of a broader shift.
A growing number of hotels, cruise ships, and resorts have identified food waste reductions as a way to shrink their environmental and social footprints, taking aim at a long-standing problem in travel. Currently, the hospitality industry wastes food in vast quantities, starting with an estimated 79,000 tons per hotel each year. Airlines threw out an estimated 1.14 million tons of untouched food and drink in 2017, according to the most recent study from the International Air Transport Association. And while the cruise industry doesn’t track wasted food, some companies do. Royal Caribbean reportedly created 1.9 million cubic feet of food waste in 2022, enough to cover a Manhattan block more than four feet deep.
Few people fail to grasp that wasting food is bad. Yet the issue goes beyond the depressing sight of moldering groceries. Food waste also accounts for up to 10 percent of global greenhouse gas emissions each year, estimates the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change—four times more than the entire aviation industry. “Through reduction of food waste, you can reduce methane and a suite of other pollutants and resource-based threats,” says researcher Brian Roe, who leads the Ohio State Food Waste Collaborative. “Reducing waste can also help address food insecurity, both in the short and long term.”
Potato Head Chef Felix Schoener repurposes everything from fish scales to watermelon rinds in order to minimize food waste across the hotel property.
Photo by Ijen Westlake
When experts like Roe talk about food waste, they generally mean things that could have been eaten, but ended up getting tossed—that leftover lasagna, or the sad lettuce currently wilting in the back of a fridge. Composting helps transform those scraps—along with inedible trimmings like eggshells and apple cores—back into valuable nutrients. At Denver’s nature-inspired Populus Hotel, which opened last fall, an on-site biodigester turns food waste into compost for local farms. In 2024, as part of a broader commitment to eliminating food waste, Norway-based cruise company Hurtigruten installed its own compost reactor in the port of Stamsund, where nearby Myklevik gård farm uses the nutrient-rich by-products to grow vegetables for the fleet. In its first year, Hurtigruten’s Stamsund composter processed food scraps that weighed as much as 19 school buses.
But unless composting is introduced alongside other reductions in food waste, Roe cautions that it can backfire. “We’ve seen a few situations where the availability of composting can actually make people feel OK about wasting food, because it’s ‘going someplace good,’” he says. “But probably 80–90 percent of greenhouse gases come from production, not disposal.”
That’s why some hotels and resorts are canceling or reimagining the buffets that have been a hotbed of overproduction—with kitchens sending out far more food than vacationers can eat, creating lots of waste in the process. This created a new challenge: How to preserve the sense of luxe plentitude once furnished by chocolate fountains and all-you-can-eat seafood towers? At Desa Potato Head, included breakfast buffets shifted to à la carte menus. They’re still all-inclusive and included in room rates, encouraging travelers to feel indulged, but they cut out the wasteful buffets and nudge diners toward intentional choices. “It’s not a matter of abundance. You can have as much as you want, but just one at a time,” says the resort’s communication manager Maria Garcia del Cerro.
When Nekajui, a Ritz-Carlton Reserve opened in Costa Rica’s Papagayo Peninsula in February, chef Lulu Elízaga decided to skip overloaded buffets—covered with food that must be tossed after service—for a “tray-to-table” buffet experience. Servers arrive with a series of platters, from fresh fruit to pan dulce, cheese, and charcuterie, until diners say basta. “I think the word ‘luxury’ is changing now,” Elízaga says. “Before you had to have a big plate of food, and now it’s like ‘let me have options, let me taste different things’. . . . It’s happening organically, and the result is there’s no food waste.”
Other chefs are turning to tech solutions, including those using AI-powered programs that photograph, identity, and weigh food being thrown out in kitchens. With the goal of halving food waste by 2030, Four Seasons partnered with Winnow Solutions at properties from Madrid to Costa Rica. After installing its AI-assisted system in kitchens at Four Seasons Resort Costa Rica at Peninsula Papagayo, chefs slashed wasted food by 50 percent in only four months—saving food equivalent to 40,000 meals.
Another entrant in the waste-cutting AI space is the Netherlands-based Orbisk, which works with travel industry clients, including Accor Hotels and Fairmont. Using raw data on discarded food, the company creates detailed analyses of what, precisely, is being wasted. “We help the chefs interpret the data, so they can really start asking themselves the right questions,” says company founder Olaf van der Veen.
Orbisk clients include Accor Hotels and Fairmont.
Courtesy of Orbisk
After Fairmont Banff Springs invited Orbisk techs to install the cameras in its sprawling kitchens last spring, for example, it learned that sauces, soups, and baked goods on buffet tables were getting disproportionately wasted and cut back accordingly. Then, when fall weather turned crisp in the Canadian Rockies, chefs noticed the data showed an uptick in wasted crudités as diners reached for cozy carbs. In response, they reduced the amount of fresh vegetables they prepared each day .
Do vacationers care about pastries going stale or crudités saved from landfills? As far as bright ideas go, taming food waste remains a bit unsexy. (“Pretty boring,” van der Veen admits.) But telling guests about sustainability upgrades is essential to making positive change last. While research shows travelers are willing to pay an estimated 5 percent premium for a greener stay, it only works when they grasp—and assign value to—the progress being made.
In this case, van der Veen says forward-thinking travel businesses aren’t waiting around for traveler demand to drive the change. And they don’t need to. Food is expensive, and prices are only going up as tariffs ripple through the world economy. “They lose a lot of money into that waste bin,” he says. “For the industry we service, the incentive is already there.”
