Levy: Sustainable Caterers at COP26

The climate emergency is the biggest challenge of our lifetime, and food has a key role to play in global emissions.

We are taking significant steps to improve our business practises and reduce our emissions, including training our teams on sustainable working practices, energy efficiency, and recycling. We have partnered with Swedish startup Klimato to calculate the carbon footprint of the dishes served at COP26 and will communicate the footprint of each dish on menu boards and online.

We also want to educate our customers about what we’re doing and why we’re doing it, ultimately encouraging customers to make healthier and more sustainable food choices.

Plant Forward Approach

We are taking a plant forward approach, using local and UK sourced in-season produce. Plant-based food products are one of the most effective ways for us to reduce emissions, so we increased the proportion of plant-based dishes, without compromising on variety, quality or taste.

Lower Carbon Menus

By increasing the percentage of plant-based produce across our menus and reducing the proportion of meat in non-vegetarian dishes, we’ve created a lower carbon menu. Carbon labelling on our menus will educate and inform guests about the carbon impact of their food. We will use our learnings from COP26 to further develop our sustainable ambitions.

Reusable Cups

At COP26 we are using the CORRETTO™ Cup which is both reusable and recyclable. We are encouraging delegates to deposit their used cups at drop points throughout the Campus so that we can collect the cups, wash them, and reuse them again and again. If every attendee at COP26 has two hot drinks a day in a reusable cup, we will have removed over 250,000 cups from our waste stream.

Key Initiatives

Food for Life

Our COP26 menus will be accredited by the Soil Association’s ‘Food for Life Served Here’ scheme. The programme focuses on making healthy, tasty and sustainable meals the norm for everyone to enjoy. These meals use ingredients traceable to farm, which are sourced locally and produced more sustainably. Food For Life website

Plant Forward Burgers

We have almost halved the meat content in our burgers and sausages and replaced this with vegetables and plant-based proteins. This plant forward approach significantly reduces the amount of meat required and therefore reduces the carbon footprint of every burger served. Grants of Speyside – who embrace a ‘field and hill to plate’ ethos – supply the meat for our burgers, which comes from Quality Meat Scotland Assured grass fed cattle.

Fruit Compote & Jams

We have been preserving our Scottish strawberries, raspberries and blackberries throughout the summer using Heather Hill honey, so whilst berries won’t be in season in November, our visitors can be assured that where berries appear on our menu, they are Scottish sourced and – dare we say it – the best in the world!

Seaweed & Seasoning

Once a staple of the Scottish diet, Mara’s seaweed flakes are now a well-loved seasoning, which we are using as a replacement for salt in many of our dishes. Nutrient dense and packed with flavours, the flakes make the health benefits of seaweed accessible to a wider audience. Mara Seaweed’s bespoke seaweed factory is a fully accredited production facility, turning fresh seaweed into seasonings within twenty-four hours.

Pizza

Our pizza bases are made with Carr’s Scottish flour, rapeseed oil, Mara seaweed and of course, Scottish Water. For our toppings we’ve got – amongst other things – Scottish mushrooms, Scottish chicken, Grants of Speyside black pudding, UK sourced tomatoes and even Buffalo Mozzarella from a Scottish Buffalo farm.

Food Waste

8-10% of green-house gas emissions are produced from food waste. We are taking steps to minimise our food waste, including ingredient replication across our menus. Our kitchen food waste will be redirected for composting so that it can be diverted back into the food system.

Menu

We have partnered with Swedish start up Klimato to analyse the carbon footprint of the food served at COP26. We will communicate the footprint of each dish on menu boards, informing attendees about what dishes have the lowest impact. Dishes will be categorised ‘Low’, ‘Medium’ and ‘High’, and attendees can use this labelling system to help choose the dishes with the lowest carbon footprint. Read more about how the climate calculations are made here.

Visit the Menu page; scroll down; select from the various menus for each meal session, and view the carbon footprints for each menu offering. Revealing!