Assessment of Food Waste Management Practices and Sustainability Initiatives in Luxury Hotels: A Case Study of the Nainital Region, Uttarakhand

Luxury hotels have a major sustainability challenge of food waste especially in environmentally sensitive tourist destinations. This paper evaluates food waste management practices and food sustainability programs embraced by luxury hotels (three star and above) in Nainital area of Uttarakhand. Data were gathered using mixed-method approach where ten hotels using semi-structured interviews with senior managers and structured questionnaires were used to gather the required data. The research questions that the study seeks to answer are the predominant sources of food waste, current modes of waste management, obstacles to the progressive waste reduction, and compatibility to the Food Waste Hierarchy and the Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) 12.3. The results demonstrate buffet surplus as the most significant cause of food waste, then the kitchen and plate waste, being an indicator of overproduction in the system. Whereas source segregation is a common practice, composting, food donation, and waste tracking through technology are all underused because of infrastructural and institutional barriers. The distinctiveness of the research is the localized, empirical analysis of luxury hotel food waste management within a hill-based tourism ecosystem, which provides a gap between the global sustainability paradigm and region-specific operation reality, as well as provides practical information on sustainable hospitality management.