Compass reports significant progress in reducing food waste 

With today marking the eighth annual Stop Food Waste Day, Compass Group UK & Ireland has announced that it has donated 79.5 tonnes of food over the past year (FY23).

This is the equivalent of around 185,500 meals going to organisations including FareShare, which received 27 tonnes; Olio, which received 29 tonnes; and Too Good To Go, which received 22 tonnes, as well as local charities. In addition, Compass has converted 753,252 litres of cooking oil into biofuels.

With 25-30 per cent of the world’s food produced lost or wasted according to WRAP – addressing food waste has never been so important.

Across Compass, its businesses are driving redistribution. Highlights include:

• Eurest and 14forty – 47 per cent food waste reduction since 2020. Waste that hasn’t been prevented is redistributed resulting in 13,434 meals saved.
• Restaurant Associates – 57 sites provided the equivalent of 40,000+ meals to charitable causes and saved 50 tonnes of fruit and veg by using Waste Knot products.
• Compass Ireland – 1,455 meals donated to Olio and Iveagh Trust.
• ESS – 66 sites donating pre-packed products and fresh fruit and veg that are close to their use by date. Since July 2023, 39,522 items of food have been saved.
• Healthcare – donated almost a tonne of edible food.
• One Retail – saved 83,552 meals and avoided 225,500kg of CO₂e using Too Good to Go across the lifetime of the partnership.
• Foodbuy – continue to partner with social enterprises who are sustainability focussed, for example its work with Rubies in the Rubble has saved 9,413kg fruit from going to waste.
• Levy UK + Ireland – almost 20,000 meals saved, since January 2022, through Olio partnership, one of many community sharing platforms Levy use to re-distribute its unserved food.
• Compass – partnership with FareShare has surpassed the redistribution of 1 million meals since 2014.

Compass aims to stop food waste through preventing, recovering and recycling. Only when food waste is unavoidable, do teams turn to redistribution and recycling. The company continues to roll out its digital recording system, which measures waste in up to five categories allowing for insight into the source of waste. This is in line with Compass’ Climate Net Zero by 2030 ambition, which commits to a 50 per cent reduction in food waste by 2030.

Stop Food Waste Day was launched by Compass Group USA in 2017 with the aim of raising awareness around reducing food waste.

Within the UK & Ireland business, 2024 activities include:

• Compass HQs in Chertsey and Parklands will hold events featuring a specially designed food waste menu including Beetroot Falafel and Broccoli hummus.
• A Compass poll showed the top three most wasted food items – salad leaves and lettuce, bread and fruits including bananas. Chefs provided innovative recipes based on the results, for colleagues to download and use.
• Chartwells has continued to work with the next generation, sharing the importance of avoiding food waste with their Beyond the Chartwells Kitchen workshops in schools. Its culinary teams have developed a series of video and recipe banks for frontline teams, to reduce food waste.
• Eurest has developed a series of Stop Food Waste Day recipes, used across hundreds of sites and for customers to use at home – they utilise ingredients which often get wasted including cauliflower stalks and vegetable peelings.
• Restaurant Associates recently opened Toast Brewing’s circular micro-brewery at Unity Place (Milton Keynes), using surplus bread from the on-site bakery in the beer making process. They are also continuing their partnership with Native – the restaurant venture from Ivan Tisdall-Downes and Imogen Davis – striving towards a zero-waste offer, sourcing produce locally and supporting regenerative agricultural practices.
• Compass Ireland continues to partner with DigiTally, a digital food waste tracking solution and 89 per cent of sites are now recording food waste daily.

Ashleigh Taylor, Head of Environment, Compass Group UK & Ireland, said: “It was estimated there was 10.7 million tonnes of food waste in 2021 – accelerating global warming, wasting water, energy and valuable resources. Stop Food Waste Day allows us to raise awareness of the environmental, commercial and social impacts of this important issue and showcase our chefs’ creativity to reduce, reuse and repurpose ingredients – preventing food waste through recipe redesign. It’s great to see the huge support globally for this initiative, as reducing food waste is a necessary, collective responsibility.”