Changes help Tangshan restaurant greatly reduce food waste

With a satisfied grin, Qian Bingkun and his wife watched a waitress pack their leftovers from a dish of stir-fried tofu and a piece of dessert in to-go boxes, while their daughter was at the reception desk paying their bill for lunch. 

The family just finished a meal at noon on Thursday at Yongmama restaurant in Lubei district, Tangshan, North China's Hebei province.

"Wow, you have upgraded the appearance of your to-go boxes, right?" the 80-year-old man asked the waitress. The answer was yes.

The waitress told him the upgrade -- changing a transparent box for one that can be microwaved and has a design found in traditional Chinese blue and white porcelain -- is to attract customers and encourage them to pack leftovers after meals at the restaurant.

"Good! Very good!" Qian couldn't help praising such measures. Too much waste should be avoided, he said.

According to Dong Xiujie, a manager with the restaurant, the upgrade is a newly rolled-out measure for curbing food waste after President Xi Jinping stressed putting an end to wasting food and called for promoting thrift in an instruction.

In addition to providing free to-go boxes, wait staffers are required to guide customers in ordering dishes. "We will stop customers when they have ordered sufficient food based on the number of people who come to eat," Dong said.

She added they also help customers separate dishes among those dining at a table, considering somebody might be shy about taking food from dishes when they are being treated by someone else.

Slogans like "Food is gift from nature, let's not waste!" are set almost everywhere a customer can see, from walls to tables at the restaurant.

"We started the changes about two years ago when we noticed too many leftovers," Dong said. She said before the changes, the restaurant, which can serve 22 tables of customers, collected at least 250 kilograms of leftovers each day.