Hotels Are Using Climate Goals To Shrink Breakfast Buffets — Guests Get Less, Owners Save More

A bunch of hotels participated in a UN event around the International Day of Zero Waste and launched ‘Recipe of Change’ to measure food waste, set reduction targets, and report annual progress. Hilton was doing a lot of dumping on breakfast buffets. But what’s really behind this is interesting.

• There’s been a multi-year push to bring hotel food into climate focus alongside energy and water. According to the World Sustainable Hospitality Alliance, hotels account for 1% of foodproduction emissions and 3% of food waste. This was a focus of the ‘Food Waste Breakthrough’ at the COP30 climate summit which the U.S. boycotted.

• Participating hotels signed onto: smaller portions, more live cooking, more frequent replenishment, and more measurement of waste.

Hilton ran Green Ramadan’ across 45 hotels in 14 countries and they say it cut waste on guest plates by 26% last year by using smaller portions and replacing buffets with menu service. Their Green Breakfast pilot across 13 UAE hotels cut food waste by 62%. Buffets are a big focus here.

• They signal abundance. Too much food is displayed on purpose, knowing it won’t all be eaten.
  
• People also take more than they’ll ever eat.
  
• Hilton has deployed AI-powered food waste prevention tool Winnow in nearly 200 hotels.

Hotels like the lower labor cost of buffets, and serving customers faster which turns tables and lets them run more people through a restaurant. And labor is ~ 60% of hotel F&B expense. That’s why buffets have been popular, and grab and go has replaced service. In fact, IHG’s Holiday Inn moved to buffet-only breakfast in December.

But buffets also,

• mean expensive food waste
  
• look gnarly if not properly maintained (labor)

And many hotels think they can cut buffet costs by trimming what they offer, which reduces food expense and waste because guests take less. And they can do it under the rubric of people choosing to be more efficient (more on the go, less lingering) and healthier (so they can drop fatty meats). And some segments may drop buffets entirely, but likely replacing them with quick service grab ‘n go rather than returning to staff-driven menus.

• cheap buffets get cut back or go away
  
• luxury buffets remain, but get optimized by AI

Hilton benefits from this effort both through direct savings on food and because virtue-signaling helps companies meet their ESG goals with the meetings they hold – while this may be somewhat out of fashion in the U.S., Hilton is a global company.

Expect to see smaller plates at buffets, too. I wrote about American Airlines using too-small plates in its Admirals Clubs so that passengers would take less food, but the plates were too small for what they were serving and just leaving a mess on the floor.

This gets pitched to owners as margin improvement, to ‘the groups’ as ESG progress, and to guests as better experience in much the way they tell you not changing out your towels, taking housekeeping, refreshing bed linens or flushing toilets is good for the environment.

Still, we’re likely to see luxury and resort properties keep buffets, select service keep breakfast bars and grab-and-go, and where the biggest shift is most likely is mid-market, full service, convention-type properties where the buffets weren’t very good to begin with (so couldn’t command a premium price).

Your buffet is about to be sacrificed on the alter of ESG, and that’s ok. It’s the virtue signaling with small plates and more ‘mindful’ selections at better properties that might grate.