We believe that sustainability should always be on the menu.
The food system as we know it is broken (Lang, 2020; Hawkes, 2018; Nestle 2020; Clapp 2020), it accounts for 25-33% of the world’s global carbon footprint (Poore & Nemechek, 2019; Crippa, 2021) the agricultural industry has one of the highest rates of modern-slavery (ILO, 2022) and food packaging is the world’s largest source of plastic pollution (OECD, 2022).
At Gather & Gather we take sustainability seriously and have worked hard to introduce a holistic approach to the food & drink we serve at Buckingham New University encompassing strategies to reduce our environmental, social, and economic impacts.
Read on to discover how we are reducing our impacts and innovating to create a future-focussed food offer on campus.
Our goal is to ensure that sustainability is always on the menu. Here are some of the actions we take to achieve this.
We Champion Fairtrade & Direct trade
Sustainable food discourse tends to concentrate on the environmental impacts of food production, however if we want to build a sustainable food system, we need to address the issue of inequality in the food industry (ISEAL, 2021).
We ensure that our procurement of chocolate, bananas, coffee, tea & sugar for food served on site is certified Fairtrade or better, thus allowing us to determine that those commodities were produced in an fair way. Our signature coffee blends, Circulo Coffee from Union is certified Fairtrade, and our Magnitude Espresso from Modern Standard served in The Garden Cafe is purchased using a direct trade model, meaning we pay a price that values the producers input creates a sustainable partnership providing farmers the opportunity to invest in infrastructure and social programs in their communities.
To learn more about why Fairtrade is so important, visit their website.
We Love Food & Hate Waste !
1/3 of food that is produced globally every year is wasted (FAO, 2020), this is not only a human tragedy when there are people suffering from malnutrition, but also an environmental tragedy, if food waste was a country, it would be the third largest emitter of GHGe (WRAP 2021). This is an issue close to our business, in the U.K. 75% of the food thrown away in the hospitality sector is avoidable and edible (WRAP, 2022).
We work hard to produce delicious food on campus, and hate seeing it go to bins not bellies. That’s why we invest time & energy into not wasting a drop, wether it is pickling our watermelon skins (we are left with a piece the size of a 2p piece !), turning our banana skins to bacon our Executive Head Chef Rob is hugely passionate about this topic and is constantly looking for ever more inventive ways to reduce all waste !
We’re Greening our Supply Chain
A large part of a food businesses’ environmental impact is found in their supply chain, as well as being a source of financial risk due to the instability of global supply chains (Garnett, 2020).
We’ve worked hard to reduce the impact of food-miles on the food we serve, all food we purchase comes in consolidated bi-weekly deliveries to reduce the number of times lorries drive to us.
We align with certifications in order to ensure that the food we serve is ethically sourced, all meat on campus is certified Red Tractor, all the seafood we serve is rated ‘Good’ by the Marine Conservation Society and we try to avoid the big 5, all our eggs are certified free-range, and products that carry a high risk of human-exploitation are certified Fairtrade.
We choose to source products that are from small producers, social enterprises, British brands, or values driven businesses, often with sustainability missions, such as Brew Tea, ModernStandard Coffee or Bottle Up.
We work with Wycombe food hub who collect residual food from us and all local supermarkets each evening, then make it available to the general public at affordable prices the next day. This way we ensure none of our produce goes to waste. Find out more about their work here.