The food waste management gap: From prevention to diversion in urban food-service establishments in India

Introduction

Rapid urbanization and lifestyle reorientation in India's metropolitan cities have catalyzed the expansion of the foodservice sector, with restaurants and hostels emerging as significant, though poorly documented, contributors to urban food waste and to the burden placed on municipal solid-waste systems (FAO, 2019; UNEP, 2024). Hyderabad, one of India's fastest-growing metropolitan cities and a major hub for education, information technology and food services, illustrates this pattern acutely: its dense and expanding network of hostels and restaurants generates consumer-level food waste of a kind distinct from the post-harvest losses that dominate India's rural food system (NABCONS, 2022). Recent regulatory enforcement in the city has exposed the structural vulnerabilities underlying this waste pest-infested produce, corroded equipment and improperly managed waste were documented across dozens of inspected hostels (Baski, 2024; Reddy, 2025) [2,22] even as monitoring capacity has remained limited relative to the scale of the public-health risk (Baski, 2026) [3] . Cutting food waste in this sector requires more than knowing how much is wasted. It requires understanding why it is wasted, and what establishments currently do about it, since management is the point at which an establishment upholds genuine control. At the same time, generation itself is shaped by many interacting operational and behavioural factors that extend only partially into that sphere of control. This distinction provides impetus for the present paper, which reports findings from a broader study of food waste generation and management practices in Hyderabad's hostels and restaurants, concentrating www.extensionjournal.com particularly on two of its three original objectives: (i) to identify the key factors contributing to food waste in these establishments, and (ii) to document and evaluate the food waste management practices currently adopted by them. The quantity of food waste generated the study's first objective is drawn upon here only as necessary background, since restaurants in the parent study were found to generate significantly more food waste than hostels, both in absolute terms (35.73 kg v/s 19.97 kg/establishment/day) and as a proportion of food wasted (12.70% v/s 7.53%); it is the factors behind this waste, and the establishments' response to it, that form the subject of the present paper. Food waste management is conventionally understood not as a single practice but as a hierarchy of pathways of decreasing environmental preference from preventing waste at source, through donation, upcycling and animal feeding, to composting and anaerobic digestion, and finally to landfill, incineration or disposal down the drain (US EPA, 2025). Establishments that manage food waste well are expected not merely to prevent what they can, but to divert what they cannot prevent as far up this hierarchy as possible. Whether India's urban food-service establishments do so and what stands in the way where they do not is the central question addressed here, framed as a gap between the prevention that establishments almost universally claim to practice and the diversion that a hierarchy-based evaluation shows they rarely achieve.

Materials and Methods

Study area and sampling

The study was conducted in Hyderabad city, Telangana, purposively selected as a rapidly urbanizing metropolitan centre with a dense concentration of food-service establishments. Thirty hostels were selected using simple random sampling from across the city's institutional and IThub clusters, and thirty restaurants were selected using simple random sampling, with five restaurants drawn from each of the six administrative zones demarcated by the Greater Hyderabad Municipal Corporation (GHMC). Primary data were collected using a structured interview schedule administered to hostel mess in-charges, supervisors, cooks, helpers and students, and to restaurant managers, procurement managers, chefs and servers. Data were collected from key informants, including the food safety officer and RUCO-FSSAI purchasing manager.

Identifying factors contributing to food waste

Beyond the pre-defined categories captured on the structured schedule, the factors contributing to food waste were investigated qualitatively through three complementary methods: (i) semi-structured, in-depth interviews (40-50 minutes) with kitchen staff, chefs, hostel supervisors, restaurant managers, procurement staff and serving staff, covering causes of waste at the procurement, preparation and consumption stages; (ii) non-participant direct observation of food preparation, storage, serving and leftover patterns before and after peak service hours; and (iii) key informant interviews with a municipal food safety officer and an FSSAI-RUCO (Repurpose Used Cooking Oil) purchasing manager. The resulting qualitative corpus in-depth interviews with 30 restaurant and 30 hostel respondents, open-ended remarks volunteered by an equal number of proprietors and supervisors, observation notes, and the two key informant transcripts was analysed using Braun and Clarke's (2006; 2019) [4,5] six-phase reflexive thematic analysis (RTA): familiarization with the data; generation of initial, inductive codes capturing both semantic and latent meaning; generation of initial themes clustered across the procurement, storage, preparation and consumption stages; review of themes for internal coherence; definition and naming of themes; and production of the final thematic account. RTA was chosen because the qualitative evidence was drawn from multiple respondent categories and multiple methods across two structurally different establishment types, requiring a technique capable of identifying patterns of meaning that recur across, as well as diverge between, these sources, rather than a fixed, consensus-driven codebook.

Evaluating food waste management practices

Information on current management practices prevention, measurement, segregation, and utilization or disposal was collected through the structured interview schedule and summarized using frequencies and percentages. The US EPA Wasted Food Scale (US EPA, 2025), which ranks twelve management pathways from most to least environmentally preferred (prevent, donate, upcycle, feed animals, leave unharvested, anaerobic digestion with beneficial use of digestate/biosolids, compost, anaerobic digestion with disposal of digestate/biosolids, apply to land, landfill, incinerate, send down the drain), was used only as the conceptual basis for a Modified US EPA Wasted Food Scale developed for the present study. Because the single-pathway categorical scale cannot capture the fact that an establishment typically diverts its waste across more than one pathway simultaneously, and because restaurants and hostels differ structurally in scale, procurement pattern and access to diversion channels, a Modified US EPA Wasted Food Scale was developed for the study, consistent with the composite, weighted approach used in indices such as FOODRUS (Amador-Cervera et al., 2024) [1] . The modified tool collapses the twelve US EPA pathways into six weighted tiers (Table 1), and a Weighted Score (range 1.00-6.00) was computed for each establishment as the sum of the products of the fraction of its total food waste diverted to each tier and the corresponding tier points:

Weighted Score = (w₁ × 6) + (w₂ × 5) + (w₃ × 4) + (w₄ × 3) + (w₅ × 2) + (w₆ × 1)

where wᵢ is the fraction of the establishment's total food waste diverted to Tier i (Σwᵢ = 1). Establishments were further classified into four performance bands: Platinum/Leader (5.00-6.00), Gold/Advanced (3.50-4.99), Silver/Developing (2.50-3.49) and Bronze/Basic (1.00-2.49), allowing a more granular, establishment-type-sensitive comparison than the categorical ranking alone. www.extensionjournal.com Group comparisons between restaurants and hostels used Welch's independent-samples t-test, appropriate where unequal variances are assumed.

Results and discussion

Factors contributing to food waste generation 3.1.1 Factors identified through the structured schedule

Restaurant respondents attributed food waste mainly to overproduction (60.0%), poor demand forecasting (43.3%) and demand fluctuations (40.0%), with unavoidable kitchen waste (trimmings, peels, bones) cited by 20.0 per cent. In hostels, demand fluctuations, over-production and poor demand forecasting were equally dominant (36.7% each), alongside low taste/quality of food (33.3%), student/customer attitude and behaviour (43.3%), unavoidable kitchen waste (26.7%), poor menu planning (26.7%) and over-cooking/preparation errors (16.7%) (Table 2). Six themes emerged from the reflexive thematic analysis, each associated with a particular stage of the food-service process.

Theme 1 Forecasting blind spots: production decoupled from real-time demand. Across all 30 restaurant interviews, poor demand forecasting emerged, without exception, as the principal driver of waste, with preparation as the locus of maximum loss; "better demand forecasting" was volunteered as the leading corrective recommendation in every interview. Production planning relied on informal, experience-driven reference to past sales rather than any formal forecasting tool.

In hostels, forecasting failure operated through the attendance register rather than sales history: cooking was planned "based on attendance," but this failed to capture same-day deviations, compounded by structural attendance shocks such as holiday periods (cited by 56.7% of hostel respondents) and examination periods (33.3%). Both key informants the RUCO-FSSAI purchasing manager and the food safety officer corroborated forecasting failure as a principal driver, consistent with Maganha et al. (2025) [16] , Filimonau et al.

(2019) and Crocker et al. (2025) [8,10] .

Theme 2 Procurement economics and storage constraints: the persistent challenge of pest infestation. Procurement in both establishment types was driven primarily by supplier economics rather than measured need: bulk buying attributable to supplier discounts was recorded in 76.7 per cent of restaurant interviews and 53.3 per cent of hostel interviews. This economic logic frequently exceeded storage capacity restaurants reported meat left unrefrigerated after over-procurement, while every hostel interviewed (100%) reported having a refrigerator, yet observation found that vegetables were, in practice, "left behind on the ground" rather than refrigerated. Storage rooms in both establishment types were near-universally pest-affected, with no pestcontrol traps observed in either type, a pattern the food safety officer confirmed directly across the roughly 100 establishments inspected monthly. These findings resonate with Charlebois et al. (2015) [6] on back-of-house inventory issues and Kumar and Prashar (2022) [14] on inadequate refrigeration among Hyderabad households. www.extensionjournal.com Theme 3 Preparation precision and error: inefficiencies in kitchen-stage practices. Kitchen-stage waste in restaurants was described in terms of precision and error rather than simple carelessness: portioning in 80.0 per cent of interviews was reported as based "on type and cost" of the dish rather than anticipated demand, and cutting or trimming losses were referenced in 93.3 per cent of interviews, with meat named the single most frequently wasted raw kitchen item (73.3%). In hostels, kitchen-stage errors were rarely tied to presentation, and instead reflected peeling, cutting and cooking losses compounded by poor-quality supplied vegetables and rushed cooking under fixed time and quantity constraints consistent with Mokrane et al. (2023) and Dhir et al. (2020) [9,18] . Theme 5 Taste fatigue and entitlement: novel consumer behaviour. Hostel students' plate waste was attributed, without exception, to boredom arising from menu repetition (100% of interviews), compounded by dislike of specific recurring dishes. A subset of responses reframed waste as an entitlement rather than an unintended outcome: since the mess fee is fixed irrespective of consumption, some students appeared to treat discarding food as a paid-for prerogative ("because they pay, they serve," volunteered in 16.7% of interviews). Restaurant customers displayed a distinct profile, including indecisive, mid-order behaviour change and a social-media-driven pattern in which customers ordered food primarily to photograph or film it rather than to consume it, corroborated by direct observation. This technologymediated ordering behaviour is not prominent in the international restaurant-waste literature and represents a locally distinctive extension of the attitudinal and behavioural-intention models of Watanabe et al. (2023) [26] and Chun T'ing et al. (2021) [7] , consistent otherwise with Rani et al. (2024) and Lorenz et al. (2017) [15,21] on hosteltype entitlement and taste-driven waste. [8,18] , no single cause dominates; rather, forecasting, procurement, storage, preparation, service format and consumer behaviour interact within a largely unmonitored operating environment and these same operational and behavioural roots, in turn, help explain the modest, prevention-only character of the food waste management practices examined next.

Food waste management practices 3.2.1 Prevention practices

All restaurants (100%) and all hostels (100%) reported adopting preventive measures demand forecasting, menu planning, portion-size control and batch cooking indicating universal, if imperfect, awareness of overproduction. All establishments reported following First-In-First-Out (FIFO) inventory management, yet over-purchasing and inadequate air circulation in storage areas were common, and pest infestation cockroaches, rodents, houseflies, mites, ants, worms was widespread. Only 10.0 per cent of sampled restaurants provided staff training, against 90.0 per cent of restaurants and 100 per cent of hostels that did not; no sampled establishment of either type had undertaken a customer-awareness initiative.

Measurement, segregation, and utilization/disposal

No sampled establishment measured its food waste systematically. Visual estimation was recorded in only 16.7 per cent of restaurants and 3.3 per cent of hostels, with the remaining 83.3 per cent and 96.7 per cent, respectively, estimating waste visually but not recording it. Waste segregation was practiced by 63.3 per cent of restaurants and 53.3 per cent of hostels, chiefly a plate-waste/kitchen-waste split. Utilization practices such as upcycling, anaerobic digestion, composting and application to land were not observed in any sampled establishment. Donation was reported by 13.3 per cent of restaurants and 10.0 per cent of hostels, with no NGO collaborations reported in either type, while animal feeding was reported by 20.0 per cent of restaurants and 40.0 per cent of hostels. Waste not utilized by establishments was directed entirely to GHMC, which routes it to landfill.

Mapping of restaurants and hostels practices against the categorical US EPA Wasted Food Scale

On the categorical scale, all restaurants (100%) and all hostels (100%) reported prevention as a practiced tier. www.extensionjournal.com Among restaurants, animal feeding (Tier 3) was the most common utilization practice (20.0%), followed by donation (Tier 2, 13.3%); among hostels, animal feeding was more prevalent still (40.0%), with donation reported by 10.0 per cent. All establishments of both types also fell into Tier 6 (landfill), since unutilized waste collected by GHMC is ultimately landfilled.

Evaluation against the Modified US EPA Weighted Score

Because the categorical scale ranks each establishment by only its single best-reported practice, the Modified US EPA Weighted Score (Section 2.3) was computed for every establishment based on the actual proportion of waste it diverted to each tier. The mean Weighted Score was 1.63 (SD = 0.63, range 1.00-3.24) for restaurants and 1.57 (SD = 0.64, range 1.00-2.93) for hostels; an independent-samples Welch's t-test found no statistically significant difference between the two groups (t = 0.38, df = 58, p = 0.70). Despite generating a significantly lower proportion of food waste, hostels were thus not meaningfully better placed than restaurants on the food-waste management hierarchy once diversion practice itself was weighted: the large majority of both restaurants (90.0%) and hostels (86.7%) fell in the lowest, Bronze/Basic, band, and none reached the Gold/Advanced or Platinum/Leader bands (Table 4). Notably, 11 of the 30 restaurants (36.7%) and 15 of the 30 hostels (50.0%) recorded the minimum possible score of 1.0, indicating no diversion whatsoever beyond source reduction. This nuances the categorical comparison: while a larger share of hostels engage in some diversion (40.0% divert to animal feeding, versus 20.0% of restaurants), a larger share of hostels also engage in none at all, reflecting greater polarization in hostel practice against a more evenly, if still thinly, spread level of diversion among restaurants. A weakto-moderate positive correlation was observed between the Weighted Score and the proportion of food wasted for both restaurants (r = 0.47) and hostels (r = 0.30), suggesting that establishments generating proportionally more waste tend to divert a somewhat larger share of it plausibly because larger volumes of surplus make donation and animal-feeding arrangements more logistically viable rather than the inverse. This uniformly low level of diversion is consistent with Srijuntrapun et al. (2022) [23] , who found continuous foodwaste management policies rare even among large hotels in Thailand, and with Gaiani et al. (2018) [12] on the persistent gap between consumer awareness of food waste and actual diversion behaviour. It also reinforces the case made by Papargyropoulou et al. (2014) [20] and Amador-Cervera et al.

(2024) [1] for weighted, hierarchy-based composite indices over single-category rankings, since the Modified Scale reveals a polarization between minimal and partial diverters that the categorical ranking alone does not capture. The neartotal absence of Gold/Advanced and Platinum/Leader performers in both establishment types suggests considerable room for improvement, in line with Ioannidis et al. (2021) [13] on the cost and brand benefits of reduce-reuse-recycle adoption in hospitality, and with Martin-Rios et al. (2018) [17] , whose distinction between reactive, cost-driven adopters and proactive adopters of more radical solutions mirrors the Bronze-dominated profile observed here.

3.2.5

The prevention-diversion gap: restaurants versus hostels Hostels' lower proportional waste (7.53% versus 12.70% in restaurants) might suggest superior management, and hostels do report more frequent use of animal feeding than restaurants. However, the Weighted Score evaluation shows this advantage does not extend to overall diversion quality: both establishment types are concentrated in the Bronze/Basic band, and all establishments of both types ultimately route unutilized waste to landfill via GHMC. This indicates that hostels' lower proportional waste is better explained by their more standardized, fixed-format service and procurement scale than by any measurably superior management practice (Section 3.1). The gap documented here, then, is not primarily between restaurants and hostels, but between prevention and diversion within both: prevention is formally prioritized and near-universally claimed, yet is rarely reinforced by measurement, training or customer engagement, while diversion beyond prevention remains minimal, informal, and dependent almost entirely on eventual disposal through the municipal system.

Conclusion and recommendations

Food waste in Hyderabad's hostel and restaurant sector is a multifactorial problem, arising from the interaction of forecasting, procurement, storage, preparation, service format and consumer behaviour within a largely unmonitored operating environment, rather than from any single cause. Establishments should be encouraged and facilitated, including through NGO partnerships, to formalize surplusfood donation and redistribution channels, none of which were reported in the sample despite regulatory encouragement. Composting, anaerobic digestion and application to land absent from the sampled establishments should be promoted through municipal incentives or GHMCsupported infrastructure to shift establishments up the foodwaste hierarchy rather than defaulting to landfill. Hostels should reconsider rigid, centrally fixed weekly or monthly menus and server-led portioning in favour of periodic resident feedback and more flexible portion-taking, to address menu-fatigue-and entitlement-driven plate waste.

Restaurants should address service-stage miscommunication (order mix-ups, delays) through staff training and consider how portion-flexible menu design might mitigate the emerging, content-driven over-ordering behaviour identified among customers. Regulatory bodies should strengthen enforcement of FSSAI hygiene and municipal solid-waste management compliance, given the food safety officer's observation that compliance remains poor across both restaurants and hostels. Civic authorities, including GHMC, may consider a simplified, low-cost waste-quantification and diversion-incentive scheme tailored to small and medium food-service establishments, to move a larger share of establishments out of the Bronze/Basic performance band identified in this study.

Limitations and scope for future research

This paper draws on a cross-sectional sample of 60 establishments in one city and therefore does not capture seasonal variation in the factors driving waste or in management response, nor does it include establishments outside Hyderabad; findings on factors and practices should accordingly be read as indicative of urban Indian foodservice establishments of this type rather than as nationally representative. Qualitative findings, being based on respondent accounts and observation, may be subject to recall or observer bias. Future research could usefully extend the reflexive thematic analysis of drivers, and the Modified Weighted Score evaluation of management practice, to larger, seasonally repeated, multi-city samples; examine the distinctive, content-driven ordering behaviour identified among restaurant customers as an emerging consumer-side driver in its own right; and evaluate, longitudinally, the causal effectiveness of specific interventions demand-forecasting tools, staff training programmes, and NGO donation partnerships in moving establishments from prevention toward genuine diversion.

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