KITCHEN CONNECT

For a glimpse into the future, step into a hotel kitchen. Fancy gadgets, innovations and processes have transformed it into a swish technology-led zone in hotels.

- SUMAN TARAFDAR

Atech disrupter in a hotel kitchen? Consider this one: In an industry where one-third of the food goes waste, it would help if hotels could identify which food majorly goes into waste. Is it the chicken or rice? Or has the dessert quantity overshot the demand? Identifying food wastage by one ingredient or dish has seemed like an impossible task. Till Winnow came along. In a world where thoughtless waste is so common, watching the Winnow Waste Monitor in action feels like almost a spiritual experience. Not only does the system — mainly a waste bin with a smart scale below it and a monitor attached to it — measures the food waste categories, it assigns a value that goes to the cloud and gets filled in a report that tells you what, when, and how much you’re wasting.

Chef Neeraj Tyagi, Director of Culinary at Pullman & Novotel New Delhi Aerocity, swears by it, and no wonder, it is helping reduce waste across the dual hotel complex considerably. “We have an iPad in which we feed all the recipes. All the food clearance from the restaurants and buffet goes into the machine by category; it is weighed and it gives you the waste in value. For example, if there is a buffet clearance of Chicken a la Kiev, the waiter just enters the name in the machine and the total weight is registered. It offers the chef the opportunity to examine issues such as: if x amount of the dish is going waste, is the recipe right? Are too many portions being prepared? How much is wasted? A detailed graphical report comes to me. Win-now tells me how much of each dish and ingredient is going to the bin. There I can control the wastage. In the kitchen, the biggest saving is on food waste.”

Winnow, a company that started life just seven years ago, has seen its innovation get widely feted and adapted by giants such as Accor Hotels and Ikea.