When my parents opened a sushi restaurant in Daegu, I worked there from the start, cleaning and prepping before opening, greeting and seating customers, taking orders, serving, and handling checkout. In the beginning, I made mistakes, miscounting plates, mis-entering totals, spilling soup, and breaking a glass. My parents told me to stay calm rather than scold me, and with repetition, I became fast and reliable, including with difficult customers.

Working there, I noticed that about 60 plates of sushi were thrown out daily, since fish can't be reused. My first idea was a discount hour before closing, which barely reduced waste. So I tracked how much of each item was wasted in a spreadsheet and wrote a program to calculate optimal daily production, cutting octopus from 10 to 6, scallops from 10 to 5, and similar adjustments across fifteen menu items that had the most leftovers.

Waste dropped from 786L in February, 725L in March 643L in April, 572L in May, and 500 in June.

Now, I have built an app so my parents can manage the food waste on their own and continuously reduce the amount of waste.