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ESS, Compass Group UK & Ireland’s, specialist business operating in the Defence, Energy, Government, Infrastructure and Marine & Aerospace sectors, has extended its partnership with community sharing app Olio to redistribute good-to-eat surplus food to members of the local community.
The company has been donating pre-packed products, fruit and vegetables to Olio since summer 2023, and has recently introduced cooked food collections. The move to include full meals is further enhancing its positive impact, supporting a reduction in food waste and helping local people in need.
Following a successful trial at a large Defence site in the south east, cooked food is now being contributed by 56 Defence sites across the country, with plans to extend the initiative into the company’s Government sector in the new year.
The ESS teams on site capture surplus cooked food immediately after the lunch and dinner services and package it into single and family sized containers with allergen labels attached. The meals are stored in compliance with food safety standards and collected by Olio volunteers later the same day.
The Olio app enables businesses and individuals to upload the details of food and non-food items that they no longer want so they can be reallocated to people who do want them, giving the goods a second life. The app has eight million users globally and 130,000 Food Waste Hero volunteers collecting unsold food from participating businesses.
ESS’ partnership with Olio has already delivered significant benefits to local communities. To date, there have been 29,683 kg or 87,170 items of edible food saved, amounting to 62,288 meals and 3,522 households fed.
Saasha Celestial-One, COO and Co-Founder of Olio, commented: “It’s fantastic that ESS is expanding its food donation efforts by sharing cooked food with the local community via Olio. This means that even more families will get access to delicious, nutritious cooked meals – which is particularly impactful at this time of year, when so many are struggling with the cost of Christmas. We hope this move by ESS will influence and inspire other caterers to follow suit and donate more food types, knowing that it’s 100 per cent safe to do so through Olio.”
Bob Gray, Managing Director – ESS Defence, Marine & Aerospace, added: “We’re very proud to partner with Olio and support the brilliant work the organisation does to reduce food waste and help those in need. The introduction of cooked food collections across our estate is a great step forward to further enhance our impact and supports the ethos of our Climate and Social promises to deliver measurable benefits to our environment and communities by 2030.”
FMJ has partnered with Watco to deliver a webinar on Thursday 30th January where we will be grilling a panel of experts on how facilities managers can maintain a safe workplace while balancing shrinking budgets.
The webinar follows the Lifting the Lid report series that the industrial paint and repair products specialist has been developing over the past few years based on research conducted with FMs across the UK. The research explored core responsibilities of the FM role, including how they have evolved in the past decade, and the associated challenges to manage.
Watco’s Sales Director and key contributor to the reports, Chris Budd, will be joined by a panel of experts including Phil Pinnington, Head of Audit & Consultancy at the British Safety Council, Nick Bray, Head of HSEQ, ISS UK and Ireland and Jenni Gallop, Director of Estates and Facilities at Provide Community.
With decades of combined experience in the introduction and management of health and safety in complex, demanding environments, the panel will provide the audience with recommendations broken down into steps that can be introduced immediately.
The panel will discuss the research data from FMs across the UK, the evidence they have seen of those experiences across industries and their first-hand recommendations on how to manage those challenges and ease the pressure.
Click here to sign up for the webinar.
