Jermayne Teo Xuan Minn (Business School), Kion Shi Rong (SoC), Lee Si Ying, Tammy (FASS), Natasha Lee Yun Zhen (FASS), Tan Wen Yi (FoS), Teo Wei Ling (FoS)
Academic Advisor: Ms. Sadaf Ansari
Industry Advisor: Mr. Rico Chang (OHS, NUS)
Food waste is unsustainable and undesirable. Besides the meaningless squandering of natural resources, it causes significant and dire environmental impacts. Our team decided to continue a study done by Ridge View Residential College (RVRC) students in AY2015-16, which discovered that food caterers at NUS Residential College (RC) dining halls err on the side of caution and typically tend to over provide student meals to ensure that residents have sufficient food to eat with a wide variety of food choices. Our study found that this is further compounded by the caterer’s inability to correctly predict the number of students going for each meal, or the take-up rate for the different types of food. We found that these factors lead to a significant amount of cooked food being left unserved on a daily basis – often as much as 15%, as indicated by the caterer of the RC dining halls. RVRC will have its own dining hall in AY2017-18, and as future residents, our team focused on exploring a potential solution to reduce the amount of unserved cooked food, by allowing paying student diners to have ‘Self-served Seconds’ at each meal after the close of dining hours. In order to gauge operational challenges as well as student perception to our proposed solution, we pilot tested this idea during term time at the CAPT-RC4 Dining Hall. Our findings assess the success of this initiative by measuring the amount of servings wasted before and after the implementation of our pilot test. Our study also integrates this data with survey responses from student participants of the pilot test to give an overall measure of success of our idea and potential changes for future adoption at RVRC.
Keywords: Waste Management, Food waste, Catering, RC Dining, Catering Waste