Research carried out at RMIT University for End Food Waste Australia found that up to 60 per cent of an average cafe's bin is food, and a good deal of it is edible, quality food rather than scraps and peelings.

The two biggest contributors were preparation and spoilage. Not customers leaving food on plates, which is where most people assume the problem sits, but food that never made it out of the kitchen in the first place.

That distinction matters, because prep and spoilage waste is the kind a venue actually controls.

End Food Waste Australia puts it in a unit any cafe owner can picture: an average cafe generates food waste equivalent to 70,000 cups of coffee per employee, every year.

Across the sector, hospitality wastes the equivalent of 4.6 million meals a day. That is more than 1.2 million tonnes a year, or about 16 per cent of all the food Australia wastes.

The national figure is easy to read past. The per-employee one is harder to ignore, because it is the size of a problem sitting inside one ordinary business.

Wasted food is not a cost like rent or wages. It is stock that was bought, stored, prepared and then thrown out, so it comes straight off the gross margin without producing anything.

The arithmetic is unforgiving on a low-margin business. If a venue runs at a five per cent net margin, then every $100 of food thrown away needs $2,000 of additional sales just to get back to where it started. At three per cent it takes more than $3,300.

Those percentages are illustrative rather than a claim about any particular cafe. The point holds at whatever the real number is: the thinner the margin, the more sales it takes to cover a dollar of waste, and hospitality margins are not generous.

The RMIT work tested practical changes rather than exhortations to try harder. The recommendations that came out of it were specific:

• Shorten the menu. Fewer dishes means fewer ingredients held in small quantities, which is where spoilage concentrates.
• Reconsider the pie warmer. Display equipment that holds cooked food all day is a reliable source of end-of-day waste.
• Normalise doggy bags, so food that left the kitchen has somewhere to go other than the bin.
• Train staff specifically on waste, rather than assuming it is obvious.
• Buy imperfect produce direct from growers, which costs less and uses food that would otherwise be rejected on looks.

The full Cafe Sector Action Plan report sets out the method and the findings in detail, and it is worth a read if you want the reasoning rather than the summary.

Every item on that list is about producing less waste in the first place, which is the right order to work in. Nothing recovers the value of food as well as not overproducing it.

But no amount of planning gets a venue to zero. Demand is not knowable in advance, and a cafe that consistently runs out by mid afternoon has traded one problem for another. There will be a remainder most days, and the question is what happens to it.

Selling it is the option that recovers actual money. Staff take and donation both have their place, and neither returns anything to the till. A late discount clears stock but can pull customers away from full price if it becomes a predictable daily event.

Foody Bag exists for that remainder. A venue lists however many bags it expects to have spare, sets the collection window and the price, and someone nearby buys one through the app and picks it up before close.

The value is not only the money recovered on the bag, though that is real. It is that the food leaves as a sale rather than as waste, and it leaves with a customer who has now been inside the shop. Some of them come back at full price.

None of that replaces cutting waste at the source. Treat it as what it is: the last step, after the menu has been tightened and the prep has been sharpened, for the food that was always going to be left over anyway.