Pre-prepared meals helping avoid waste

Heeding the country's call to avoid wasting food, many Chinese families are buying partially-prepared dinners for their Chinese New Year's eve family banquet, reported the Beijing-based Legal Mirror.

Families traditionally celebrate the start of Spring Festival, which falls on February 9 this year, by preparing mounds of food that take hours to cook only to have many leftovers discarded after the dinner.

In recent years many more people are choosing partially-prepared dinners for Spring Festival Eve. They save time and also come in different sized portions, which customers say helps avoid waste.

"We sell partially-prepared dinner sets in various sizes. There is a set for five people and sets for over ten people. So the customer can avoid buying too much food." a staffer with Meizhou Dongpo restaurant in Beijing, told the Global Times.

"We expect to sell over 50,000 dinner sets for Spring Festival dinner this year, twice as many as last year. Probably, the trend of avoiding wasting food might help boost of our business," a sale manager, surnamed Gong, from a Suzhou-based food company told the Global Times.

The issue shot to public attention after the Party's General Secretary, Xi Jinping, urged people to avoid wasting food in his speech.