Food-waste log and Friday waste-cost report (n8n recipe)

Outcome: Stations log waste in a few taps, and every Friday the chef gets the week's waste cost by item and reason, with three production questions to discuss.

What you need

• A Google Form on a kitchen tablet: item, station, reason (overproduction, spoilage, trim, plate waste), weight, shift
• Google Sheets with the form responses plus an item cost-per-kg tab
• n8n (cloud or self-hosted)
• An LLM node (e.g., OpenAI or Anthropic credentials)
• Email

Steps

1. Set up the Google Form with dropdowns for item, station and reason so logging takes four taps; responses land in Google Sheets.
2. Schedule Trigger: Fridays at 2:00 PM.
3. Google Sheets node: read the last 7 days of waste entries and the cost-per-kg tab.
4. Code node: cost each entry (weight × cost per kg), then total by reason, station and item, and compare with last week's totals stored in a history tab.
5. LLM node: write a note of about 120 words: the three costliest items, the main reason for each, and one production question per item for the chef (e.g., 'Cut Sunday brunch hash browns by one hotel pan?').
6. Email node: send to the chef and F&B director; Google Sheets node: append this week's totals to the history tab.

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Frequently asked questions