re: What happens to leftover food at restaurants?

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I have my manager at my restaurant throw all our leftovers away. If I allow employees to take it they will intentionally mess up an order or cook too much so there is always something to take home. If you give it away at closing to someone you think may need it those same people come back at all hours of the day expecting it and bugging the register workers about it.

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That's a real issue. I've worked in Pizza Buffet/delivery for decades.

I'll share some information:

90% of buffet customers don't eat their "money's worth". So while it seems awfully wasteful, that wasted food is the cost of providing fresh variety to paying customers.
Alas, contrary to popular belief, buffets are incredibly hard to make/keep profitable.

As far as donating to homeless, at Pizza Hut near LSU in the late 90s, we donated leftover buffet food to St Vincent DePaul in Baton Rouge. We had no contract in place to protect Pizza Hut from litigation. Nobody thought of that. It's crazy to imagine needing that when giving away food to the poor.

I sold a set of industrial boilers to a firm that has contracts to handle the waste from the Casino kitchens in Vegas. Everything goes out the back door and is hauled away to a processing center where the stuff is sorted through. They retrieve the silverware, china, etc. that was sent out with the trash and sell it back to the casinos. After sorting out hazardous or inedible items, anything that can be processed for hog feed is then loaded into huge processing vats and steam sterilized before being fed to the hogs. After processing, the hogs are fed back to the casino customers.

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At a restaurant my wife once worked at, they took all the leftover rolls, cornbread, and hushpuppies, threw in a jar of pimentos and leftover gravy and turned it into tomorrow's cornbread dressing. It was wonderful.

The ashes from Miss Effie's cigarette may have been the secret ingredient.

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My son worked as a bus boy at a fairly renowned restaurant when he was in high school. Told me once = "never eat the tartar sauce" = they salvaged all the leftover tartar sauce when they cleaned the tables and put it back into the source vat.

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anything that can be processed for hog feed is then loaded into huge processing vats and steam sterilized before being fed to the hogs.

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We had a large pack of Walker foxhounds when I was a kid. My dad arranged with a local nursing home to pick up their “scraps” every day, and we fed it to the dogs. He later started picking up the craps from an elementary school lunchroom. There was no sterilization involved. The dogs loved it.

Old guy I knew years ago raised hogs and he'd dumpster dive every night to get enough to fill up totes in the back of his station wagon and use that to feed his hogs.

Between grocery stores dumping lots of produce past their sell-by date and food from restaurants, he had some huge arse hogs.

You restaurant owners should pick up on what the too good to go app is doing. They’re monetizing what they’re throwing away and cutting deals to people willing to essentially pay for a grab bag of grub.

Y’all should check it out. None in BR or NOLA. A few in Houston but a ton in DC and elsewhere. I’ve already checked it out in advance of a trip to the latter the week after next.

Some money and exposure is better than shoveling into the trash one would think.

It goes in the trash for full service places. Anyone telling you otherwise is lying

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He later started picking up the craps from an elementary school lunchroom. There was no sterilization involved. The dogs loved it.

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Those poor dogs.