How hotels use AI to cut food waste at the buffet
Winnow shows kitchens exactly what they throw away, when and why. A camera and connected scale sit above the bin (image: Winnow).
At COP31, host nation Turkey asked countries gathered in Antalya to back its Zero Waste initiative. One United Nations Development Programme session looked at ways to put organic waste from tourism and other sectors to use, and how that waste can be avoided to start off with.
Open buffets are notorious where that's concerned: kitchens must make extra food so trays look full and abundant from the first guest to the last. If guest numbers are hard to predict, chefs over-prepare to avoid empty trays.
Addressing this issue, an increasing number of hotels use AI-assisted food waste tracking. Accor, Hilton and Marriott are among the major hotel brands that deploy the technology. In the COP31 host city of Antalya, the Rixos Downtown Antalya hotel has deployed an automated weighing system from Dutch company Orbisk; it records what goes into the bin and how much it weighs.
So how does this work?
A connected scale records the weight added to the bin, while a camera captures an image that computer vision uses to classify the food. Some systems offer staff a shortlist of likely categories when the software is unsure. Over several services, the records can help kitchen teams distinguish recurring preparation scraps from food made for the buffet and never served. If one dish regularly comes back in quantity, the chef can cook a smaller batch or put out less at the final replenishment. Food left on guests’ plates may call for a different response, such as changing portion sizes.
How much a kitchen saves varies. In a 2025 study published in Waste Management, researchers installed automatic tracking devices from Swiss company KITRO at five hospitality and catering sites, including three hotels. During the intervention, food waste fell by 23% to 51% at four sites, with reductions particularly in preparation waste and overproduction. At the fifth site, a Swiss hotel, waste actually rose by 13%.
The Rixos Hotel in Antalya says that the Orbisk system reduced food waste in the staff canteen by 24% after staff surveys, analysis and changes to menu planning. Hotel operator Essendi has reported results for a larger group of kitchens using measurement to guide changes in practice. It says the 36 hotels that joined its programme in 2025 recorded an average 26% reduction in food waste per meal, after introducing tools such as Orbisk and Winnow alongside staff training and changes to kitchen routines.
How hotels forecast buffet demand
Once a kitchen has a record of what it served and what came back, it can use that history before the next shift starts. Winnow, a UK food waste technology company, launched a forecasting tool developed with Hilton chefs in September 2026. It uses occupancy and previous service records to suggest preparation quantities for individual dishes. After breakfast, staff can photograph the leftovers. The software estimates their weight from the image and feeds the estimate back into future forecasts.
At Hampton by Hilton Budapest, Winnow reports that the weight of breakfast leftovers fell by 69% over six months, including a 64% drop in leftover croissants. The Budapest pilot specifically used Winnow Foresight, a mobile-first AI forecasting app that predicts demand from occupancy and past service data without requiring extra camera/scale hardware. The company recently reiterated that businesses using its technology save more than $100 million a year in food costs across more than 3,500 locations in over 100 countries.
While forecasting can reduce the amount of surplus a kitchen has to deal with, chefs can sometimes also find a use for what remains. Winnow’s November update featured chef Shriya Gurung of Waldorf Astoria Doha West Bay, who turned leftover breakfast hash browns into gnocchi and used surplus mushrooms and cheese in the dish.
What hotels do with food scraps
For scraps that cannot be served, some hotels have installed equipment to process them on site. Grand Hyatt Singapore documented a system that sends food waste through vacuum pipes to a central grinder, removes water from the pulp and feeds it into a heated digester. In its 2022 sustainability material, Hyatt said the plant could process 1,000 kg of food waste into about 300 kg of fertiliser within 24 hours. Two resorts in Antalya, IC Hotels Green Palace & Villas and IC Santai Family Resort, say they compost fruit and vegetable scraps from their kitchens with garden cuttings.
Even with these positive initiatives, zero waste remains an overly ambitious goal as hotels continue to weigh guest expectations against environmental targets. Still, turning kitchen data into everyday habits to trim both carbon footprints and operating costs is a clear step in the right direction.
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