ProteaSeed

07/12/2019

Sustainability is a word we hear a lot in the contract catering industry. But it’s a lot more than just getting rid of plastic straws. Are we taking a broad enough approach to sustainability?

I’ve shared some of my recent experience and thoughts in a new post on our site. I would love to hear your thoughts on sustainability so let me know what you think.

I’m currently working with a large client on an area which is very close to my heart - sustainability. I have been designing an entire roadmap of sustainability initiatives to take us right through to the end of 2020. I appreciate I am lucky to be in a position where I have a very supportive clien...

23/08/2019

The Flexitarian Revolution in the Workplace

In May 2017, I changed a busy corporate staff restaurant into a vegetarian restaurant for a week to mark National Vegetarian Week. This was also on the back of trending expansion of vegetarian options and outlets - think Pret a Manger's 'Veggie Pret' outlets. Whilst it was a significant risk to try this out in a corporate setting, the customer response and feedback were massively positive. I have since made another outlet on the same site a permanent 'free-from' restaurant, offering vegetarian, vegan, pescatarian and gluten-free dishes only. The offering includes hot meals, a salad bar, deli sandwich counter, pre-packed sandwiches, grab-and-go pots, snacks and desserts.

The success of the restaurant largely due to the changing demands of diners. In particular, with millennials now an established part of most workplaces up to middle management, studies have repeatedly reported that this demographic is far more health-conscious at a younger age than preceding generations. One of the more interesting trends that emerge from this is 'flexitarianism' - people who do eat meat but choose to limit it to two or three times per week. We get the opportunity to sell a lot more vegetarian food to non-vegetarians, but our offer has to adapt.

The contract caterer has historically included a 'vegetarian option' on the menu. Flexitarianism is making vegetarian, pescatarian and vegan dishes more mainstream and demand is skyrocketing. There is opportunity to be grasped in expanding the range of these dishes and even completely shifting focus from having a 'vegetarian option' to having majority vegetarian dishes with a 'meat option'.

Launching a 'free-from' restaurant has taught me that flexitarianism is not a 'fad' and is going nowhere any time soon. Demand for meat-free dishes is only going to grow, and the traditional 'staple dishes' of contract catering aren't sufficient any more. Health-conscious customers will just walk out and go to high street outlets instead. As contract caterers we need to adapt to this or get left behind.

18/08/2019

This is something not a lot of people have awareness of.

There are hundreds of strains of banana, but the one we are all familiar with is the Cavendish Banana. They are considered by far the superior strain for our tastes, in terms of taste, texture, colour and shape.

The Cavendish Banana faces an uncertain future however. A strain of fungus which can affect many types of banana has been spreading rapidly. The Cavendish is particularly susceptible to it, and the fungus is wiping out entire plantations. Many banana plantations in Asia and Africa have been destroyed and it has recently been detected in South America which is the source of most of the bananas we buy in Europe.

The Cavendish isn’t the first banana variety to face such a threat. Before the 1960s, the Gros Michel was the dominant type of banana but it too faced a similar threat from fungal disease, and producers switched to the Cavendish instead as it was then held to be more resistant.

There are efforts ongoing to alter some of the other banana varieties to bring them closer to the Cavendish. It seems likely however, that we will eventually just end up in the same situation if we find a ‘new’ banana to rely on.

Maybe we could find ways to bring some of the other varieties of banana into our food supply chains? Perhaps we can’t find another variety as nice to eat as a snack, but there are many other ways in which we consume bananas and perhaps additional variety would be beneficial in catering, food products etc.

A fungal banana disease that experts describe as a serious threat to production has reached Colombia.

16/08/2019

There has been much talk recently about possible trade deals with the US if Brexit goes ahead. One thing that often comes up is food standards and, in particular, chlorinated chicken. It's something to be concerned about, but maybe not for the reasons we've mainly been hearing about.

Chlorine-washed food is something we are more familiar with than you might think - much of our vegetables are washed in similar solutions. It's not ideal, certainly, but not as scandalous as we might be led to believe.

What I find more problematic is the reasons behind WHY much American chicken is being treated with chlorine. It is due to chickens being housed and processed in terrible conditions. We see overcrowded battery farms and often unsanitary slaughterhouses. Without the chlorine treatment, the meat being produced may carry vast amounts of bacteria and grime.

It is vital that animals raised for consumption are treated with respect and due care, from farm to fork. We should look to enforce more rigorous standards around how animals are raised and slaughtered, implement stricter controls and audits to uphold these standards, and ensure we are careful about how products are packaged and labelled to allow consumers to be fully informed.

Washing something with chlorine may kill bacteria, but it cannot wash away the underlying issues with the US food chain. Instead of focusing on chlorine, if we focus on better farm to fork standards in a trade deal, we don't even need to worry about chlorinated chicken.

Fears over practices like chlorine-washing chicken are unfounded, says the head of America's farm lobby.

14/08/2019

Wasting food, wasting money? Facing up to food waste in contract catering

I've recently been thinking a little about food waste in the contract catering industry and wanted to quickly share a little of my experience in working with the issue.

I recently worked with a client where waste was a significant problem. Between food waste and coffee wet waste, over 14,000 kilograms were simply being thrown away each and every month. I don't think this client was unique by any means, so the amount of food being wasted across the UK contract catering industry each and every month is likely to be huge.

Of course, the caterer on site didn't set out to waste so much food - the issue arose simply through lack of consideration of the cost and impact of this waste. This meant that no controls had been put in place to curb wastage or manage it better. For instance, the rate of production of food was such that the counters were just as full at the end of service as at the beginning, meaning there was an unnecessarily high amount of unsold food at the end of each service, which was all thrown away.

Every year, approximately a third of food produced for human consumption is lost or wasted.
As caterers, food is central to our business - the production and consumption of which is closely tied to the environment. We have a responsibility to ensure that our operating practices don't cause further undue harm to the environment - both from an ethical standpoint and simply due to the fact that our industry would face an upheaval if environmental damage or climate change became too severe.

There are a couple of things that can be done to reduce wastage for a client, for example:

1) Consider how your menu can be changed and shaped to minimise wastage. Perhaps consider changing the menu more often whilst shortening dish rotation (e.g. a menu which is seasonal and changes every 3 months, with dishes on a 4-week rotation, rather than a menu which changes every 6 months with dishes on an 8-week rotation). This allows for better planning of stock levels, and also increases the ability to freeze certain food which looks like it will not be needed and use it a few weeks later. As an additional benefit, it facilitates production of fresher, seasonal dishes to
enhance the offering for customers.

2) Make smarter decisions around the number of portions of each dish produced. It is senseless to reach the end of a service and have full counters of food which will be wasted. Consider using historical sales data to get a better picture of how many servings of a given dish are likely to actually sell, and plan accordingly. It is important to always have a plan B however - you can't perfectly predict sales so if a dish sells out early, make sure to have something that can be quickly and simply produced to replace it.

3) Consider also changing individual portion size, particularly where many meals are going unfinished.

Of course, it's important not to forget customer impact when making changes such as the above. Communication, education and engagement are key to get customers on side, who may initially not understand why their favourite dish has run out towards the end of service, or why it has been rotated off the menu. Customer engagement can be a challenge, but again there are a few things which can be done - I ran a 'Food Waste Week' which involved some purposeful under-production of dishes to get customers used to the idea of a particular dish finishing early and being replaced. We were quite up front with customers and essentially said 'for the next week, we will aim to sell out of one main dish 30 minutes before the end of service, and another 15 minutes before the end of service, but there will always be replacements or other main dishes available' - this allowed us to really open up a discussion with customers and explain what we were trying to achieve. We also distributed information including explanations and justification around the initiatives we were putting in place, and also a number of 'facts and figures' around the global impact of food waste to try embed with customers the importance of what we were doing.

*It takes a land mass larger than China to grow the food that is never eaten each year.*

Ultimately, whilst the above is just one example, we should all be thinking about how much food we waste as part of our contracts, and how we can minimise it. It is not just morally and ethically the right thing to do, but also economically sound. Food costs money to produce, and waste costs money to remove, so we can directly save our clients' money by being smarter about what we produce and what we waste.

Whilst food waste is going to eventually be something that everyone on a personal level needs to take some responsibility for, as climates change and populations increase, we as caterers need to be aware of our professional responsibility and lead the way.