Guided by the sustainability journey of restaurants and chefs, Metro Turkey continues its efforts to create zero-waste menus and kitchens to avoid food waste. Aiming to avoid food waste with zero-waste menus on New Year’s Eve, one of the times when tables are most decorated with a variety of dishes, Metro Turkey has prepared an exemplary New Year’s Eve dinner with chef Umut Karakuş for this purpose. At the event held at Muutto Galataport, many special flavors were presented, from turkey with oranges to beetroot meatballs, from chickpeas to hummus and pumpkin, with no food wasted, with the special presentation of Karakuş.
Sinem Türung, CEO of Metro Turkey, expressed in her speech at this special invitation that restaurants and chefs add value for sustainability transformation: “Gastronometro website contains all the sustainability information, trends, examples of best practices in the world and in Turkey that has a restaurant or is needed for business. Through this platform we steer the steps that the food and beverage industry will take towards sustainability and we bring solutions to our shelves that enable them to offer sustainable products to their customers. We also develop recipes with examples to prepare zero-waste meals for companies. In the Waste Reduction Menu guide, which can be accessed through the portal, we include the criteria for creating sustainable menus and suggestions for sustainable food and meals. The “Guide to tackling food waste in hotels, restaurants and other places of mass consumption” they created was an important guide for the sector, explaining that they had also started training on tackling food waste, which is a first in the field for companies in the food and beverage industry is the focus of the guide. Sinem Türung said, “One of our biggest wishes for the New Year is that all kitchens and menus are ‘zero waste’,” and that they want to set a good example together with chef Umut Karakuş leading this wish.
Sinem Türung – Umut Karakus
“Waste-free cooking is no longer a choice, it’s a necessity”
Chef Umut Karakuş, who expressed his delight in working with Metro Turkey in which they share the same goal as a chef, said: “A zero-waste kitchen is no longer a choice, it is a necessity for our future. With every morsel of food wasted, we throw away our future. For this reason, it is of great importance that chefs and companies take this issue more seriously and adapt all their business processes accordingly. In this regard, Metro Turkey is doing very valuable work. It not only serves us with a wide range of products, but also shows us how we can implement zero-waste menus.”
Emphasizing that the zero-waste New Year’s Eve dinner they prepared, Karakuş emphasized that the zero-waste New Year’s Eve dinner they prepared are the foods they want to make sustainable with special products for our country, which save them from waste and turn them into a new taste, Karakuş said: “As a starter, the Grisins we offer were prepared by re-flavoring the uneaten breads. We took a cue from local cuisine by using mardin bulgur, made from ancestral seeds, in beetroot meatballs. We use the hummus that is not consumed later to make chips.”