Luxury Hotel Chef Donates Leftover Food To Shelter Dogs

Rather than add to the global food waste crisis, Chef J Gourmet, who is the head chef for the five-star Hotel Fairmont in Abu Dhabi, has come up with the perfect solution. Chef J Gourmet is repurposing the hotel’s unused food by doing some good for the community.

This head chef has begun using the leftovers to create gourmet dog food, which is then distributed to the stray dogs in the local area.

The program is known as the Doggy Bag Initiative. How it works is the restaurant staff collect all the leftover food into large trash bags following all meals. As Chef J Gourmet assures, the staff are careful to leave out ingredients that aren’t dog-friendly, so items like desserts or super rich sauces and heavily spiced foods are not included.

Once collected, all left over meats, grains, and vegetables are put through the hotel’s industrial grinder and transformed into five-star gourmet dog food!

Both the chef and his staff will personally present the food to the Cloud 9 Pet Hotel and Care – a local animal shelter and stray rescue. These dogs definitely enjoy their gourmet leftovers.

Food waste is a major issue worldwide. Based off a report by Boston Consulting Group, a deplorable 2.1 billion tons of food gets wasted every year! Besides being wasteful, food waste ends up contributing to bigger environmental problems, such as pollution.

It is large organizations, such as hotels, restaurants, and supermarkets, that are responsible for generating so much of the world’s food waste. Most of it is perfectly good; however, food safety laws prevent it from being re-purposed for human consumption.

Luckily, there are no laws preventing it from being fed to stray dogs in need.

Since Chef J Gourmet started his Doggy Bag Initiative, several other hotels in the area have also followed suit, including Hotel Al Wahda Grand Millenium and Hotel Crowne Plaza.

Chef J Gourmet wants his actions to inspire even more hotels and restaurants to share their leftover food with stray dogs. Perhaps this wonderful program that helps combat food waste will be the next global trend for 2020? What do you guys think? Shall we start a hashtag?