Entrepreneurs in the kitchen: Chefs’ effectual logic in food waste management

Food waste is a major challenge in professional kitchens, where high work pressures and variable demand make effective prevention uncertain. This study explores how senior chefs prevent food waste under uncertainty through effectuation theory. Findings from 21 semi-structured interviews reveal chefs’ food waste prevention practices align with all five effectual principles: means orientation, affordable loss, leveraging surprises, controlling the uncontrollable, and co-creation. Beyond these, the study extends effectuation by uncovering three novel factors: collective effectuation (distributed decision-making across kitchen teams); bounded effectuation (constraints imposed by structural, organizational, and cultural demands); and waste tolerance (a pragmatic recalibration of the 'affordable loss' effectual principle, which emerges in response to the constraints of 'bounded effectuation’). The study contributes to entrepreneurship and hospitality scholarship by repositioning effectuation as a dynamic logic of environmental sustainability. It offers recommendations to empower chefs through creative adaptation and collaboration, enabling them to navigate the systemic bounds to effectuation. • Explains chefs’ decision-making under uncertainty through effectual logic. • Shows chefs enact five effectuation principles to manage food waste. • Extends effectuation theory with waste tolerance, bounded and collective effectuation. • Reveals organisational, structural and cultural barriers to effectuation. • Reframes effectuation as a sustainability logic in professional kitchens.