A photo of piles of uneaten Little Caesars pizzas recently drew eyes on Reddit, sparking important discussions about restaurant food waste.
The excessive pizza waste apparently resulted from an ordering system outage at a busy Little Caesars location.
What happened?
According to a Reddit post made by the employee, their busy store's ordering system went down on a hectic day.
Employees had to quickly switch to handwritten paper order tickets, which led to "a lot of mistakes and miscommunication."
At the end of the day, the location was left with a "mountain of pizzas" that never made it to customers.
"I honestly think they would've made more money closing the store early after realizing their system wasn't working," the employee wrote.
Reddit users expressed disgust at the amount of food wasted after the technical malfunction.
"Stuff like this leaves me little hope for society," one commenter wrote. "Is it really necessary to throw all of these away???"
Why is restaurant food waste concerning?
Food waste has major environmental and social impacts. If food waste were a nation, it would be the third-largest emitter of planet-heating gas pollution after the United States and China, as detailed by the Center for Biological Diversity. In the U.S. alone, 63 million tons of food is wasted annually, according to a report cited by Bloomberg.
Wasted food ends up rotting in landfills, producing methane gas that contributes to our overheating planet. Meanwhile, over 44 million Americans routinely go to bed hungry. Restaurants are responsible for much of this waste. The food service industry throws away 22 billion to 33 billion pounds of food each year.
Is Little Caesars doing anything about this?
It's unclear if this mass pizza waste was an isolated incident or a more widespread problem at Little Caesars. The company has not issued a public statement on this matter.
However, Little Caesars does donate pizzas on a corporate level. In 2020, the corporation announced that it had donated its 1 millionth pizza to health care workers on the frontlines of the COVID-19 pandemic.
What's being done about restaurant waste more broadly?
Several organizations are working to combat restaurant food waste by making it easier to donate excess food that is safe to eat. The Bill Emerson Good Samaritan Act, signed into law in 1996, protects restaurants from liability when donating to nonprofits.
Apps like Too Good To Go connect restaurants with surplus food to customers willing to purchase it at a discount. Folks at home can reduce personal food waste through meal planning, using up leftovers, and composting scraps.
With solutions like donation programs, secondary discount markets, and composting, restaurant food waste is a solvable problem. There are even plenty of stories of retailgrocers springing to action to prevent quality food from going to waste, and this viral pizza failure can be an opportunity to implement practical solutions more widely.
Join our free newsletter for cool news and actionable info that makes it easy to help yourself while helping the planet.
Cool Picks
