Exploring Sustainable Food Waste in Serbian Hotels: Practices, Challenges and Managerial Perceptions

Food waste is a major economic and environmental problem and challenge in the hospitality sector in the global market and in developing countries such as the Republic of Serbia. This exploratory expert-based research aims to investigate the management opinions, as well as the practices and challenges faced by them regarding the sustainability of food waste management in hotels in Belgrade. A specially designed questionnaire, created by the author, was administered to general managers of 9 hotels of different sizes and structures. For the methodology of this study, a five-point Likert scale was used to assess sustainability awareness, employee training and operational constraints. In addition to the Likert scale, methods such as Spearman's rank correlation and Mann-Whitney U tests were used to analyze the relationship between the variants. The results from this exploratory expert-based research indicate a high level of management awareness of the importance of food waste monitoring, among which there is a significant lack of employee training systems and established procedures in hotels. Moreover, the results show significant positive correlations between training awareness and sustainability, as well as between operational procedure challenges and perceptions of business profitability. The study contributes significantly to the lack of literature on the sustainability of food waste management in hotels. The contribution of the research work is reflected in the conclusion that daily education, standardized procedures and defined food waste monitoring systems are absolutely necessary for achieving business and environmental efficiency and effectiveness in hotel operations.