Tag: food waste

May 19, 2019

The Game

How a Facebook group is using the Wetherspoons app to feed homeless people.

One night in Salisbury, £260 of food and (non-alcoholic) drinks were bought by strangers from all over the UK and internationally.

Wetherspoons has an app that allows customers to skip queuing at the bar to order food and drink. It also means you can play pranks, sending orders of peas or Fruit Shoots to any table of your choice at one of around 900 ’Spoons across the UK.

Chris Illman from Fareham formulated Wetherspoons The Game! and founded a page for it on Facebook. The idea is simple: people post a picture of themselves and their table number and wait for fellow group members to send them stuff – anything at all. Last week’s players included Tiffany turning 21 at The Swan in Weymouth, a hen party at The Panniers in Barnstaple and someone celebrating the loss of their virginity, allegedly, at The Manor House in Royston.

But among the rowdy revellers was a post from The Standing Ordr in Southampton which asked people to donate food that would be distributed to people rough sleeping nearby.

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May 16, 2019

Elysia Catering

From rescued food to Artisan bites.

Sophie Andre, founder and director of Elysia Catering, went from delivering breakfast bags to people’s workplaces in London to feeding the likes of Airbnb, WeWork, and government agencies, while creating a smaller circular economy hub in the supply chain for food otherwise wasted.

Named after the Ancient Greeks’ location of the blissful afterlife, Elysia Catering is a social enterprise. To date, its breakfasts and aperitifs have “saved from waste more than seven metric tons of artisan British food and served over 19,000 people around London,” according to the company’s website.

Setting up a food project in London, where the survival rate of businesses over five years is 39.3 percent—the lowest in the United Kingdom according to the Office for National Statistics—is no easy feat. But the city also provides fertile ground for waste-cutting initiatives, as its food and environment strategies aim to reduce food waste by 50 percent by 2030. The U.K.’s food industry throws away 1.9 million metric tons of food annually, of which almost 58 percent is avoidable, according to U.K. charity WRAP.

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February 12, 2019

The Refillery

The Refillery joins Edinburgh’s zero-waste revolution.

Revolutionising the everyday shop, The Refillery, one of Scotland’s first dedicated plastic-free grocery stores opened its doors on Wednesday 16th January.

Witnessing the problem of plastic and spurred on by the slow pace of change from UK retailers, founder Kelly Wright has made a huge leap from her successful career in the food industry to launch the new business single-handedly.

Driven by her passion for reducing plastic consumption, Kelly was inspired to change her whole lifestyle, establishing The Refillery as a positive solution for all.

Part of the new eco-friendly shopping movement in Edinburgh, The Refillery offers an alternative by removing disposable packaging from the household goods on offer.

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January 16, 2019

Restaurant sustainability

Fish skin and plastic bans: Tasting the future of restaurant sustainability.

Meet the chefs leading the charge for change and making the restaurant industry more sustainable as waste produced each year by the food service and hospitality sector hits three million tonnes.

A calm oasis off a busy main road, Native, a restaurant near London Bridge, is beautiful. Its bright dining room with exposed brick walls is made warm and welcoming with green foliage scattered about and shaggy blankets thrown over window seats. It’s the kind of place with trendy ceramics and a daily-changing menu with refined, elegant dishes like a pearl barley cracker with pickled corn or venison bao.

But Native co-owners Ivan Tisdall-Downes and Imogen Davis don’t run the restaurant like most. The tables are made out of recycled materials from the theatre industry; the coffee cups are made from waste coffee beans and other biomaterials like seaweed; that pearl barley cracker dish came about after a chef burnt the grains; and old menus printed on recycled paper can be spotted on tables, repurposed as taco holders.

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December 2, 2018

Rubies in the Rubble

Condiments with a conscience: Delicious Ketchup, Mayo and Relishes from Fruit and Veg headed to landfill.

When Jenny saw the amount of discarded produce at fruit & veg markets across London she started reading up about the food waste problem.

Over 1/3 of produce never reaches our plates. This is equivalent to 1.3billion tonnes of food worldwide every year. Delicious mangoes, tomatoes and more are discarded and head to landfill, often because they don’t look right. An estimated 20-40% of UK fruit and vegetables are rejected before they reach the shops.

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September 30, 2018

Food waste plan

The UK food industry has adopted a revolutionary new food waste plan.

All major supermarkets, alongside Nandos and Coca-Cola, are on a list of 90 firms which have pledged to halve the amount of food binned by 2030.

Every year, the UK chucks away £20 billion-worth of perfectly good food – now 90 businesses are leading the fight to bring that number down with the world’s first Food Waste Reduction Roadmap.

Developed by grocery research charity IGD and waste reduction body the Waste and Resources Action Programme (WRAP), the roadmap aims to show large business how they can reduce food waste in their own operation and suppliers from field to fork.

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August 21, 2018

Community Fridge Network

Community fridges are helping tackle Britain’s growing food waste crisis.

Could a scheme that allows residents to donate their surplus produce help tackle Britain’s £13bn food waste problem?

Towns across the UK are battling food waste by setting up community fridges that give everyone access, regardless of their financial situation.

With the average UK family wasting £470 worth of food a year, the initiative, launched by environmental charity Hubbub, allows locals to donate their surplus fruit, vegetables and perishables to the referral-free food bank.

The Hubbub network currently supports 32 fridge projects across England, Scotland and Ireland with creative partner Tessa Tricks taking inspiration from across Europe.

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July 31, 2018

Northern Soul Kitchen

Don’t let it go to waste.

Regeneration and healthy eating in Berwick.

“At the end of the day I wanted the town to have the ownership of it. I didn’t want it to be something I had done, I wanted it to be something ‘we’ had done”, says 25 year old Millie Stanford, “I wanted to build up some sort of momentum for change in the town”.

Millie is the co-founder of Northern Soul Kitchen, a food waste initiative and pay-as-you feel cafe in the heart of Berwick-upon-Tweed. The project, which recently opened its doors on is based in a previously abandoned shop.

Using unsold food from the local Tesco’s and other small local shops in Berwick they aim to create healthy food in a welcoming environment. Customers pay whatever they think the food is worth, making it accessible for those who might otherwise not be able to afford it. You can even volunteer your time and skills to pay for a meal.

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July 15, 2018

The Inconvenience Store

‘The food is free’: New market opens to battle food waste.

Forget the price tag: ‘pay what you feel’ that tomato is worth.

If there were no price tags at the supermarket, do you reckon you could guess the value of a bag of potatoes or a packet of rice?

That’s what you will have to do at a new Thornbury grocery, where customers will name their own price for their goods.

Called The Inconvenience Store, and claiming to be a Victorian first, it will be staffed by volunteers and stocked with food ‘‘rescued’’ from supermarkets and markets.

It opened behind the Lentil As Anything restaurant in High Street on July 8.

For the past 18 years, Lentil as Anything has run volunteer-operated restaurants that ask customers to ‘’pay as they feel’’.

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June 11, 2018

Toast

Toast the end of food waste with this award-winning, social beer.

One-third of all food is wasted. That’s 1.3 billion tonnes wasted globally every year – 15 million tonnes in the UK.

We recently saw statistics showing that if global food waste was a country, it would be the 3rd largest greenhouse gas emitter on the planet, behind China and the USA.

In the UK, bread is top of the list of our most wasted household food items, with almost 900,000 tonnes of bread wasted every year. That’s around 24 million slices every day!

Toast, a beer company that brews their beers with bread, is on a mission to end this waste.

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