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The purpose of this study is to investigate how hotel guests can be nudged for more active engagement in hospitality plate waste prevention and moderation at buffets, through designing effective persuasive interventions. Plate waste is a main sustainability challenge, and it is considered one of the major drivers of food waste in the hospitality sector, whose operations generate excessive amounts of waste. The hospitality industry, featured by all-you-can-eat buffet-style settings, is somehow encouraging consumers to increase the amount of food ordered or taken and not been eaten.

This study reports a field experiment conducted in a real hotel setting, where persuasive interventions were targeted to consumers at the croissants buffet, when guests were making their selections. The research tests the persuasiveness of functional and experiential appeal messages to nudge hotel guests towards a more active engagement in avoiding plate waste. Each single treatment was carried out for three weeks in varying sequence.

The findings are based on 63 rounds of data collections and show the superiority of experiential appeal messages in positively influencing guests’ behaviour. This implies that appropriate messages can persuade tourists to avoid plate waste in buffet-style settings, especially if these messages are grounded in participatory cues with an emphasis on altruistic values.

This is one of the few studies that empirically tests the effectiveness of different persuasive interventions in a real consumption setting, thus measuring actual behaviours which have been rarely studied. This study further contributes to the identification of concrete communication tools that can help to mitigate plate waste generation.

The effectiveness of a message to persuade tourists to consume healthier and more ecological food may be influenced by (1) the message content, (2) the message sender and (3) the receiver of the message. This study analyses effective persuasion of tourists by simultaneously investigating how these three characteristics influence tourists' healthy and ecological food choices at hotel buffets.

A randomised 4 × 2 between-subject experimental design, replicated in two hotels, collected perceptions of 329 participants on four persuasive messages aimed at increasing food consumption in a realistic and natural setting at hotel buffets. The eight treatments included four persuasive messages (placebo appeal, health appeal, environmental appeal, local origin appeal), each with and without endorsement (i.e. with/without a specific sender).

Message content, in particular health and local provenance-related messages, and the characteristics of the receiver (tourists' attitudes and habits) influence food choices on holiday while the sender (endorsement) was found to be less influential. This implies that appropriate messages can persuade tourists to eat in a considerate manner from hotel buffets, especially for tourists with favourable attitudes and everyday behaviours.

This paper contributes to theory and practice in persuasive communication to encourage healthier and more ecological choices in hedonistic consumption. Specifically, this paper is the first to present an integrated empirical analysis on the simultaneous influence of (1) message content, (2) presence of an identifiable sender and (3) receiver characteristics, on healthy and ecological eating behaviour of tourists.

The use of comment cards is a very popular method for obtaining customer feedback in the hospitality industry. An investigation was made regarding the current status of comment card usage in hotel‐restaurants offering high quality, Sunday champagne buffets, in Las Vegas, Nevada, USA. Cards were assessed with regard to frequency and mode of availability, information content, service quality, card design, and management follow‐up. Although 81 per cent of the buffets made use of comment cards, problems were found with accessibility, comprehensiveness of information, questionnaire design principles and frequency of call‐backs.

This study aims to shed light on the phenomenon of food waste generation by the food and beverage sector of hotels of Mauritius as well as examine the current status of food waste management.

The hospitality industry is responsible for significant amounts of waste, more than one-third of which is food waste. Through the comparison between an Italian and a Romanian hotel, this paper aims to provide a better understanding of food waste management trends in the hotel industry as well as to highlight hotel kitchens and hotel food services weaknesses and opportunities to minimize food waste.

In-depth interviews, personal communication and observations were conducted to investigate food service planning, food procurement and food waste management, as well as to better comprehend current individuals’ understanding and attitudes, infrastructures, legislative culture and opportunities either from the managerial and the employees’ perspective. Data were analyzed according to a content analysis approach.

Three critical hot spots emerged from the analysis: prediction and check of guests’ attendance, communication and transparency with local suppliers and among departments within the unit and purchasing frequency and perishable food provisioning. The accurate forecasting of the number of guests and their nationality is fundamental in avoiding food waste at food service, as well as implementing transparency and communication with local suppliers.

Although academia and authorities have recognized the crucial importance of food waste management, food waste research in the hotel industry remains under-researched. The present exploratory research contributes to the scarce empirical studies about hotels’ food waste, giving theoretical and managerial recommendations for supporting further studies, highlighting the need for formal deals between hotels and local suppliers (food procurement), as well as the importance of food-networks that holds together companies, retailers and charities (food donation).

The purpose of the present research is to examine the underlying motivations of food and beverage (F&B) hotel managers towards their intentions to implement food wastage initiatives in the Indonesian hotel sector.

Using in-depth personal interviews with 26 F&B managers, this study employed the theory of planned behaviour (TPB) to explain F&B managers' intentions towards implementing food wastage initiatives.

The study findings revealed prevailing constraints (such as lack of resources and rigid menu design) preventing them from carrying out their food wastage plan. There was evidence of disparity between who the F&B managers perceive about as important (injunctive norms) and supportive about their food wastage initiatives as compared to the perceived actual behaviour (descriptive norms) of these important reference groups. One such discrepancy is where respondents believe that senior management is important and would support their food wastage initiatives, but the senior management themselves do not allocate resources to combat food wastage.

The findings have important implications for hoteliers to rethink and motivate hotel employees to carry out food wastage initiatives effectively with a more synchronized approach between different management levels.

This is the first paper to examine the discrepancy between injunctive and descriptive norms between middle and senior management in hotels. A key theoretical contribution to the body of knowledge is the fractionation of injunctive and descriptive norms to understand subjective norms in TPB elicitation research.

This study aims to increase knowledge of the ability of nutrition labels to guide consumer choices in real-life environments.

Food consumption and plate waste data were collected from two self-service restaurants (SSR) with different customer groups over six observation days: three control and three intervention (with nutrition labelling) periods. Study Group 1 consisted of vocational school students, mostly late adolescents (N = 1,710), and Group 2 consisted of spa hotel customers, mostly elderly (N = 1,807). In the experimental restaurants, the same food was served to the buffets during the control and intervention periods.

The nutrition label in the lunch buffet guides customers to eat fewer main foods and salads and to select healthier choices. Increased consumption of taste enhancers (salt and ketchup) was observed in the study restaurants after nutritional labelling. Nutrition labelling was associated with a reduction in plate waste among the elderly, whereas the opposite was observed among adolescents.

The results provide public policymakers and marketers with a better understanding of the effects of nutrition labelling on consumer behaviour. Future studies should further evaluate the effects of nutrition labelling on the overall quality of customer diets and the complex environmental, social, and psychological factors affecting food choices and plate waste accumulation in various study groups.

The paper aims to examine the activity‐based costing (ABC) method as a feasible and appropriate tool for the casino and hotel industry to apply to support kitchens in order to eliminate the monthly allocation of overhead based on variable costs.

Data were collected at a support kitchen in a Las Vegas casino. These data were analyzed by using ABC methods and establishing ABC costs. ABC methods were compared to traditional allocation methods to determine, first, if allocations could be eliminated entirely; and, secondly, to establish if some outlets would be significantly impacted by the accounting change.

An ABC approach can be applied to support kitchens and total cost (ABC) can be estimated. This approach allowed the casino to eliminate traditional allocation methods based solely on food cost.

ABC was shown to be a powerful technique that can be applied effectively in a support kitchen of a casino. Since this paper involved only a single support kitchen in a single casino, further research should be conducted to confirm that ABC can also be applied in support kitchens in other hospitality industry settings.

The use of ABC techniques confirmed that the ABC process is a useful tool in an effort to abolish allocations and can be applied to the remaining support kitchens. Without the benefit of this paper, restaurant management for individual food and beverage outlets received an unfair share of the overhead and did not have appropriate cost information for bread products.

ABC may be a powerful technique when applied effectively to the food and beverage operations in the field of hospitality.

Sustainable food practices have been recognised as a key issue in efforts to improve and report sustainable tourism practices, given the importance of the social, environmental and economic impacts of the food industry throughout its entire chain of production – from farm to fork. From this standpoint, the aim of the present paper is to propose a comprehensive framework for reporting or making decisions concerning sustainable food management in hotels, taking into account the various facets of the food supply chain.

Several dimensions are proposed for dealing with sustainable food management, involving all aspects of food supply chains that may be relevant for hotel decision-making. Furthermore, some key criteria for creating and using indicators of different types (qualitative and quantitative) to address these various dimensions of sustainable food management are suggested. Subsequently, the proposed framework is validated with the sustainability criteria and indicators provided by the top eight hotel groups, according to the 2019 SAM Annual Corporate Sustainability Assessment.

Hotels neglect a number of aspects of sustainable food management identified in the framework. The quality and the quantity of the information provided by hotels are limited.

There is a need to improve sustainability in food management in the hotels under analysis in several areas. A comprehensive framework such as that proposed in this paper may be of great value in seeking to remedy this situation. It may also assist users of hotel services and communities in making more informed decisions.

The proposed framework may be beneficial in advancing academic debate towards a more embracing and relevant understanding of sustainable food management in hotels and on the indicators required in this regard.

It is seldom realised that with the nationalisation of British Railways, the world's largest catering undertaking has fallen under state control. Though representating but an auxiliary activity of the British Transport Commission, the Hotels and Catering Services employ a staff of more than fifteen thousand persons and attain a yearly turnover of eighteen million pounds. In their forty hotels (with a capacity of six thousand seven hundred beds), four hundred refreshment rooms, seven hundred fully equipped dining cars, all the minor catering installations such as trolleys, kiosks, mobile refreshment room units and automatic slot machines is invested a value of eleven million pounds. It must be pointed out that these figures do not include any of the catering facilities of the Pullman Car Company Limited whose undertaking forms a special part of the Transport Commission and of which the fixed assets alone amount to a sum of over four hundred and ten thousand pounds.