How We're Using Data to Reduce Food Waste at MyLahore Without Losing Kitchen Instinct

Blog 14 May 2026 By Hamza Jamal

Food waste in hospitality is rarely a single problem with a single solution. It is a collection of interconnected pressures: how demand is forecast, how teams are briefed, how kitchens are run, and how deeply the people involved understand and trust the information available to them. At MyLahore, we have been working through those pressures honestly across our restaurants and our events and catering business, and this is what we have found.

Why Instinct Alone Is Not Enough at Scale

When you run one site, experienced instinct is genuinely powerful. A head chef who has spent years in the same kitchen develops an accurate read of what the day needs: which dishes will move, which will sit, when to push prep and when to hold back. That expertise is not something you replace or override.

The difficulty is that instinct does not transfer automatically when a business grows. Across five restaurants in Leeds, Bradford, Manchester, Blackburn and Birmingham, each site carries its own rhythms, its own customer base and its own demand patterns. Teams vary in experience. Seasonal and local factors differ between cities. What reads as a reliable signal in one kitchen is not necessarily applicable to another. When you add large-scale events and catering to the picture, the variables multiply further.

What we started to see, as we paid closer attention, was that waste was not arriving as a dramatic problem. It was accumulating quietly: small daily overages in prep, over-ordering driven by an instinctive preference for surplus over shortage, and in our events business, a structural tension between presentation standards and the food that inevitably comes back from the table. Individually, none of those issues feels catastrophic. Collectively, they carry real weight on margins and, for us, on something more than margins.

A Responsibility Rooted in Values

For MyLahore, the decision to address food waste more seriously was not driven by cost alone, though cost is a genuine factor. In our faith and culture, wastefulness carries moral weight. In Islam, israf, the concept of excess and squandering, is clearly discouraged. Food is understood as a blessing and a responsibility, not a resource to be treated carelessly. That perspective matters to us as a business and shapes how we approach this work. We are not simply trying to optimise a cost line. We are trying to operate with greater integrity.

Understanding the Real Waste Problem in Each Part of the Business

One of the most important things this process has taught us is that the restaurants and the events business have fundamentally different waste challenges. Treating them as the same problem was an early mistake that we have since corrected.

In Restaurants: A Prep and Ordering Challenge

In our restaurants, plate waste is not the primary concern. Most guests finish their food or take leftovers, and visible table waste is relatively low. The real losses occur earlier in the day, in daily prep items that are produced in volume and do not always find their way to a plate: rice, mashed potato, custard, sauces and batch sides are the consistent culprits.

The underlying driver is an over-prep buffer mindset that exists across the industry, not just at MyLahore. The fear of running short during service pushes teams to prepare more than is needed, and the connection between actual sales trends and purchasing decisions is often weaker than it should be. Compounding this is the fact that demand is genuinely variable in ways that a simple weekly average does not capture. Bank holidays behave very differently from normal weekends. School holiday periods shift both volume and dish mix in ways that differ from term time. Winter and summer patterns diverge. And critically, each of our five sites has its own character, so group-level averages mask the site-specific signals that actually matter for daily prep decisions.

In Events and Catering: A Presentation and Estimation Challenge

The waste dynamic in our events business is quite different, and it took us time to diagnose it properly. The assumption we initially made, that the primary issue was kitchen overproduction, turned out to be largely incorrect. Most of our pans come back empty. Kitchen preparation is not where the significant loss is occurring.

The real waste happens at the table, and it is a direct consequence of how events catering works in our context. Serving bowls and platters are filled to three-quarters capacity as a minimum. That is not an arbitrary standard. Guests at a wedding or a corporate dinner expect generous, full bowls on the table. A bowl that looks underfilled sends the wrong signal, and the reputational risk of guests feeling that the catering has been mean or poorly prepared is one we take seriously. We will not compromise on that.

What this means in practice is that guests take what they want and leave the rest. The food remaining in the bowl cannot be reused. It either goes to waste or is taken by the hosts. The mathematics of table presentation mean that some level of waste is structurally inevitable as long as we maintain the standards our clients and guests expect.

The Six Drivers of Waste in Our Events Business

Through careful analysis of our events operation, we have identified six consistent factors that drive waste, each of which requires a different response.

Fewer guests than booked. When we prepare for 220 guests and 180 attend, 40 portions of every dish are surplus before service begins. Because our method involves cooking, chilling and reheating in advance, quantities are committed well before the event. There is no practical mechanism for reducing portions on the night.

Regional eating habits and dish preferences. Guests from different backgrounds bring different preferences and portion expectations. At any given event, some dishes are taken heavily while others return from the table almost untouched. Where we know the demographic composition of an event in advance, we can begin to adjust our per dish per 100 guests model accordingly.

Late service following extended canapes and starters. When mains are scheduled for 8pm but do not arrive until 9pm, guests have been eating for an hour. By the time the main course is served, appetites are significantly reduced and dishes come back with far more left than anticipated.

Health-conscious or specialist attendees. A medical conference dinner or a wedding within a health-focused professional community eats measurably less than a general wedding crowd. Our standard per-head model overestimates by approximately 15 to 20% in these cases. The challenge is that we cannot always confirm the composition of the guest list with confidence until close to the event date.

Table presentation requirements. With ten guests per table and a full bowl of each dish expected as standard, even a table that eats 40% of what is served will return a substantial amount. We cannot send a bowl that looks underserved, and we would not consider doing so. This is the hardest constraint in our events operation, and it is one we have accepted as a fixed parameter rather than a variable to work around.

The fear of running out. This is, honestly, our most significant psychological driver. Our estimates already incorporate around 10% contingency for late additions to guest numbers, which is common in our communities. Most events end with no visible shortage. That means, systematically, we are over-preparing. The fear of running short is greater than the actual risk, and it shapes behaviour at every stage of planning.

An Honest Acknowledgement About Events Waste

We want to be direct about something: we will never eliminate waste completely from our events operation while we are filling bowls before we know how much guests will eat. That is a deliberate choice. We choose to protect our reputation and our guests’ experience over pursuing zero waste, and we stand by that.

What we can do is reduce current waste by approximately 5 to 7% by applying our Food Estimate Sheet rigorously at every event, adjusting for the six drivers above wherever the information is available to us, replacing blanket overproduction with calculated risk, and systematically tracking which dishes return untouched so that future quantities can be refined. The goal is not to change the bowl on the table. It is to be more precise in the preparation that sits behind it.

What We Have Changed in Our Restaurants

In our restaurants, the practical intervention has been to introduce what we call Prep Intelligence across our sites. Each morning, kitchen teams work with a prep baseline derived from recent sales history at that specific location, broken down by day of week, seasonal period and local patterns. Chefs review that baseline alongside whatever context they hold about the day ahead and adjust accordingly.

It is important to be clear about what this is and what it is not. It is not an instruction. It is a starting point, and the team’s judgement remains primary. What it has done is give that judgement better information to work with. In practice, we have seen chefs push back usefully when the data underestimates a likely busy service, and we have seen the data flag volume spikes that instinct alone would have missed. The value is in the dialogue between the two, not in one replacing the other.

The patterns we now track consistently at each site include POS data by day and season, the distinct behaviour of bank holidays compared to normal weekends, school holiday and term-time variation, and seasonal volume shifts that are specific to each location rather than averaged across the group.

What We Have Changed in Events

In our events business, we have moved from a flat per-head calculation to a model that accounts for what we now understand about the factors shaping demand at each event. Quantities are now calculated with reference to the number of guests confirmed against the number booked, the number of dishes on the menu, whether service is buffet or sit-down, the type of event, and where available, the demographic profile of the guest list.

This does not resolve the table presentation challenge. That constraint remains, and our position on it has not changed. What the adjusted model does is reduce the layer of over-preparation that has historically compounded the waste underneath it.

What We Have Learned About the Limits of Data

It would be misleading to present this as a story of data solving the problem cleanly. There have been occasions where our sales patterns suggested lower prep, walk-in numbers spiked during service, and we ran tighter than we wanted. Data reduces risk. It does not eliminate it. That is precisely why the relationship between data and kitchen experience matters so much. Neither is sufficient without the other.

Where We Are Now

We are now working toward consistent integration of multiple signals across all five restaurants and our events operation: POS data, bookings versus actual covers, procurement patterns, weather, and local events and community calendars. These are no longer separate observations. The aim is for each to inform the others in a way that gives our teams the most complete picture available before a service or event begins.

We are not pursuing a future where a system tells our kitchens what to cook each morning and in what exact quantities. The skill and experience of a head chef who has spent years cooking South Asian food at volume is not something a dashboard replaces. What we are building toward is a genuine working relationship between data and expertise, where each strengthens the other.

What This Process Has Taught Us

Several things stand out clearly at this stage.

The waste challenges in our restaurants and our events business are different in nature and require different approaches. Recognising that distinction clearly was the necessary first step.

Starting with the data you already hold is more valuable than waiting for a more sophisticated system. The insight is often already present in sales records, booking history and service patterns. It simply needs to be looked at properly.

Waste reduction and quality do not need to be in tension. Our concern that tightening prep volumes would compromise what lands on the table has not been borne out. The discipline has, if anything, improved consistency.

The team must be part of the process from the start. If the people responsible for prep do not understand why the approach is shifting, or do not trust the numbers in front of them, the data stays on a spreadsheet and nothing changes in the kitchen.

Some constraints are real and should be acknowledged rather than designed around. Table presentation in events is non-negotiable for us. Accepting that honestly is not a failure. It is the foundation for making meaningful progress within the space that actually exists.

A Note on Where This Is Heading for the Industry

Food waste in hospitality is a data problem, a planning problem and a behaviour problem, and most operators already have the information they need to make meaningful progress. The barrier is rarely access to data. It is the habit of looking at it systematically and using it to change how decisions are made.

We will keep sharing what we find as this work develops, because we think the food service industry benefits from honest accounts of what this actually involves, not just the ambitions.

Come and Eat With Us

We have restaurants in Leeds, Bradford, Manchester, Blackburn and Birmingham. Find out more about us or get in touch.