Sodexo recognises that we all have a part to play in reducing the impact of our everyday activities on the environment. That’s why we have set ourselves the target of having 33% of our menus plant-based worldwide, and halving food waste across all sites by 2025.
CSR has always been a key focus of Sodexo’s partnership with OCL and in June 2022 I was appointed to help embed Sodexo’s initiatives across 52 Oasis primary and secondary schools.
There are a number of pressures and responsibilities that our schools, parents and pupils are facing, and this is why the support from school meal providers is more important than ever.
Having joined Sodexo following a 20-year teaching career, I understand the responsibilities well. I’ve been on the academic side and have seen the challenges first hand – the time pressure that school leadership teams and staff are under, the need for a holistic approach to food that goes beyond providing a meal on a plate and advocates overall mental and physical health, and the importance of engaging with more parents about the benefits of their child taking consuming a hot school meal every day.
To support OCL with its sustainability goals, Sodexo has been introducing initiatives on reducing food waste and providing sustainable food options.
Making dietary changes, such as moderating consumption of meat and increasing and eating a wider variety of plant-based ingredients can help reduce our environmental footprint and it is these two areas we have been focusing on with a number of initiatives aimed at engaging, educating and inspiring action from students and staff.
The successful trial of carbon menu labelling in partnership with Klimato at two Oasis secondary schools (Oasis Academy Arena in Croydon, south London and Oasis Academy MediaCityUK in Salford, Greater Manchester), is informing ongoing menu development with our development chefs reviewing high CO2e recipes such as cottage pie and beef lasagne to replace part of the meat content with high quality plant-based protein alternatives.
The trial results from the initial months of the trial showed an increase in uptake of CO2e friendly options at both schools.
The Klimato system uses a traffic light system with ‘low-medium-high’ CO2e emissions labels to provide pupils and staff with an at-a-glance understanding of the environmental impact of each dish on offer.
During the trial the number of students choosing low carbon meals rose from 78% to 90% at Oasis Academy MediaCityUK and from 71% to 88% at Oasis Academy Arena.
In addition to low carbon meals we are also actively looking at ways to encourage students and staff to adopt more plant-rich meals as part of their diet. We are doing this with the help of WWF-UK and the development of Plant+ by Finer Diner promotion.
With the strapline ‘Let’s change the world. One meal at a time’, Plant+ featured new plant-rich dishes based on popular, traditional meat-based meals and inspired by the Future 50 Foods report published by Knorr Professional and WWF-UK in 2019.
As part of Plant+ each school had a teacher and student ambassador to help the catering teams raise awareness of the new sustainable plant-rich meals in class and at mealtimes. The ambassadors led a pledge campaign, asking for everyone to make at least one plant-based pledge and to help encourage uptake of the Plant+ meals through sampling sessions.
When we ran this promotion last year we found that every participating school said they had increased their plant-based food offering to some extent. It was clear from the interviews with catering managers and student surveys that the meals were well received by both teachers and students. Students who completed surveys gave an average score of 8.5/10 for the taste, improving from four before the pilot.
We are continuing to work with WWF-UK and are currently preparing for the next phase of Plant+ by Finer Diner, which will build on the learnings gained so far and will be designed to encourage nudge behaviours to deliver lasting, sustainable change that is good for both pupils and the planet.