Skip to main content

Sustainable Food Policy

We're committed to providing diverse, healthy and sustainable food for our customers. We'll work towards sustainable improvements with our current catering partner. We aim to embed the principles of this policy in all future catering contracts to help us to achieve our sustainability goals.

A member of the catering team preparing some food for a customer

This policy covers all food outlets and catering across the University.

Sourcing:

  • No use of palm oil in food produced in-house and ensure products in our supply chain only contain responsibly sourced and certified palm oil.
  • Serve sustainably caught fish from the UK
  • Work with our suppliers to increase our range of Marine Stewardship Council (MSC) accredited sustainable fish.
  • Buy British high welfare meat and dairy products, as well as free range locally-sourced eggs
  • Work with our procurement team to embed sustainability into our supplier contracts.

Environment

  • Reduce end of day food waste through “Too Good to Go” app
  • Reduce waste of single use hot beverage cups through use of a levy on single use cups
  • Zero use of single use plastic cutlery at all outlets
  • Reduce single use plastic bottle wastage by providing free access to drinking water in our catered outlets
  • 100% of waste cooking to be collected and recycled to make biofuel
  • Food waste segregated and collected for recycling via anaerobic digestion
  • Minimise carbon emissions from vehicles by consolidating and limiting supplier deliveries to campus.

Society

  • Develop menus to showcase seasonal produce
  • At least one plant based food item available from all outlets daily
  • All outlets to rate five star for food safety
  • Catering partner to ensure fair pay, as evidenced by Living Wage Employer accreditation
  • Investigate options to work towards a sustainable food framework.

To date we have:

  • Tripled the number of hot drinks purchased using reusable cups
  • Given out 2,441 meals through the Too Good To Go App
  • Given away 500 bags of used coffee grounds to customers to use in their gardens each year
  • And all of our used cooking oil is recycled and turned into biofuel

Progress

So far, we have:

success
Tripled the number of hot drinks purchased using reusable cups
success
Given out 2,441 meals through the Too Good To Go App
success
Given away 500 bags of used coffee grounds to customers to use in their gardens each year
success
Recycled all our used cooking oil and turned it into biofuel.

Governance

This policy is approved and monitored by the University’s Strategic Environmental Sustainability Group, as part of the Environmental Sustainability Action Plan 2025-2030.

Approval Date:

Review Date: