Most catering chains have a food waste tracking process. Almost none of them have food waste data that would pass a CSRD audit.
The distinction matters. Under CSRD’s ESRS E5 framework, large catering operators — those meeting at least two of three criteria: more than 250 employees, more than €50 million in net turnover, or more than €25 million in total assets — must report on food waste with data that is traceable, comparable across sites, and verifiable by an external auditor. That is a meaningfully higher bar than most current tracking processes are built to meet.
The problem is structural
Site-level logging is typically manual, done by kitchen staff in varying formats with varying levels of diligence. Account managers aggregate it manually. The data that reaches a sustainability report has passed through several rounds of human consolidation, each of which introduces the possibility of error or inconsistency.
The result is data that the sustainability team knows is imperfect, even if it is the best they have.
What fixing it requires
Fixing this requires two things: a logging tool simple enough that kitchen staff actually use it consistently, and a data layer that aggregates automatically without manual intervention.
Zipli provides both. Kitchen staff log in under 30 seconds. The dashboard aggregates in real time across all sites. The data is comparable, timestamped, and formatted for reporting without manual compilation.
The CSRD deadline is not a future problem. For operators that size, it is now.
Reference: CSRD ESRS E5, European Financial Reporting Advisory Group (EFRAG). Read the ESRS E5 resource use and circular economy standard.
