What Buffalo Wild Wings Does With Leftover Food

Since it's virtually impossible to eliminate all food waste in a restaurant, finding something useful to do with leftover food is a challenge for many chain restaurants. Since 2019, Buffalo Wild Wings has contracted Quest Resource Holding Corporation to provide waste and recycling services for the chain's locations across the United States.

One of the interesting facts about Buffalo Wild Wings is that it's owned by Inspire Brands, an Atlanta-based company with a food empire stretching over 33,000 restaurants, including such household names as Arby's, Dunkin', and Baskin-Robbins. Inspire Brands has a waste reduction policy centered around preventing waste, edible food donations, and responsible waste disposal. The company encourages franchise owners to connect with local nonprofits for donations of leftover food on a franchisee level. With over 500 Buffalo Wild Wings franchisee restaurants, this means food donation activity on a restaurant level will depend on the location.

Inspire Brands also works with food distribution partners to donate food on a larger scale, though it isn't clear which food chains in their portfolio are involved in this. Unlike Papa John's, Buffalo Wild Wings doesn't appear to have a Harvest Program to coordinate leftover food donations, choosing to focus more on reducing unnecessary food waste from occurring, while encouraging franchisees to adopt their own donation programs.

Thanks to its partnership with Quest, Buffalo Wild Wings is able to tackle food waste in its restaurants in some unique ways. One is Quest Proganics, a single waste program which separates food waste from different types of recyclable packaging, before turning it into compost, biofuel, or animal feed. This approach makes it easy for teams to adopt in the workplace, and allows up to 95% of potential organic landfill to be diverted and put to good use. Alongside its agreement with Quest, Buffalo Wild Wings has piloted its own waste management program, which involved 30 of their sports bars. Inspire Brands estimated that if fully implemented, the program could save more than one million pounds of chicken and 350,000 pounds of fries from being wasted each year.

Buffalo Wild Wings is also making internal efforts to cut down on non-food waste, in the form of packaging. The chain switched to reusable dishware across its locations in 2019, preventing the waste of 700 million pieces of plastic and paper, as well as introducing steel kegs in place of bottles and cans. Since Buffalo Wild Wings is the largest pourer of draft beer in the U.S., this alone has saved an impressive 15 million pounds of container waste from landfill.