At a Footprint Forum in association with Foodsteps held earlier this summer, foodservice experts shared practical tips on how environmental data can be harnessed to help deliver net-zero. By Nick Hughes.
1. Focus on the big picture
Although challenges remain over ensuring the consistency and quality of environmental data, Foodsteps founder and CEO Anya Doherty said there are reasons to be positive over the direction of travel. In particular, collaborative efforts to harmonise how data is measured and collected should be seen as a source of encouragement. As examples, Doherty namechecked the LED4Food project, part of the UK Government’s Food Data Transparency Partnership, which aims to develop a standardised product level accounting method for food and drink, as well as Wrap’s industry protocols for scope 3 measurement and reporting, and the Hestia programme based out of the University of Oxford which is aiming to develop a harmonised open-access database for agricultural production practices and environmental impacts. Doherty also urged businesses to let go of their instinct to capture accurate environmental data on every product and focus on the areas that deliver greatest impact. For many of the food businesses Foodsteps has worked with around 10% of their ingredients account for 80-90% of the carbon impact. “We’ve got it in our heads that we need to be looking at everything, and that if we don’t capture it all we’re doing a bad job,” said Doherty. “Let’s not focus on such a confusing big picture. Let’s just make the problem smaller and easier to deal with.”
2. Engage leaders on their terms
Attendees were told how there is huge variation in the literacy of business leadership teams when it comes to reading and interpreting environmental data. Doherty said the complexity can be overwhelming for someone not working with this kind of data on a day-to-day basis. Rather than deluge decision makers with a vast array of facts and figures, speakers agreed it was important to focus on a few, key data points that persuade leaders of strategic commercial value in supporting a decarbonisation agenda. Meredith Ford, UK&I head of sustainability for SSP Group, which owns food travel brands including Upper Crust, Ritazza and Millie’s, explained how her team focuses on two to three sustainability KPIs to build familiarity and knowledge among senior leadership. This includes presenting examples of the carbon footprint of different recipes which helps build the case for changing the menu and ingredient mix. Ford also stressed the importance of being able to tell a compelling commercial story around sustainability. “Energy is a really good one. From our program [installing] automated meter readings in almost every unit we’re saving hundreds of thousands of pounds a year. That’s really easy [to] sell-in.” Echoing the point, Andrew Peet, head of energy management at ISS, said there is a need to evidence the financial impact of specific sustainability interventions in order to gain and sustain traction within the business. Where legacy energy assets need to be replaced to support decarbonisation, for example, Peet said the commercial value needs to be made clear to decision makers “because a lot of these decisions are made based on a payback or return on investment”.
3. Find the sweet spot between stats and stories
The need to build business resilience to supply disruptions was a subject that came up repeatedly during the forum. From floods and droughts to global conflicts and foreign trade policies, food and drink companies are increasingly vulnerable to sudden shocks to the system, with the effects reverberating down the supply chain, impacting price and availability. Yet making the case at board level for investment in resilience planning can be challenging. Future risks can’t be captured neatly in a single data set – ingredient emissions data, for example, may be key to evidencing a reduction in scope 3 emissions but it doesn’t capture the vulnerability of crops grown in key growing regions to extreme weather events. Part of the discussion centred on the importance of marrying relevant environmental data, where it exists, with powerful narratives which explain to decision makers what a lack of resilience means in a real-world context when it comes to sourcing key raw materials and what actions they can take to minimise those risks.
4. Bring suppliers along for the journey
Building supplier support for a decarbonisation agenda requires a mix of carrot and stick. Claire Atkins Morris, sustainability director for Sodexo UK & Ireland, explained how 99% of the business’s total emissions sit in scope 3, 38% of which are within its supply chain (the greatest share is energy use on client sites). That makes it vital to collaborate with key supply chain partners if Sodexo is to achieve its net-zero by 2040 target. Sodexo has said that by 2030 it will stop working with businesses that can’t demonstrate tangible progress in support of its net-zero agenda, including by setting targets validated by the Science-Based Targets initiative (SBTi). Atkins Morris was keen to stress that this isn’t about Sodexo laying down the law to suppliers and then leaving them to figure it out for themselves. Small and very small businesses are being given two-year grace periods to achieve milestone targets for 2025 and 2027, and Sodexo has also put in place a mentoring programme to provide suppliers with the guidance they need to meet its requirements. “We didn’t want to just go, ‘hope you’ll be all right with that’,” said Atkins Morris. “We’ve asked ‘what support do you need’?” As of the end of the 2024 reporting period (ending May 31st 2024), 30.8% of Sodexo’s in-scope suppliers had set SBTi validated targets, covering 53.9% of its supply chain emissions. Mike Hanson, director of sustainable business for WSH, agreed that supply chain collaboration is key to driving sector-wide decarbonisation. “It can’t just be a one-way street because we all need to achieve the same thing,” said Hanson.
5. Turn robust data into dough
Having a credible decarbonisation plan backed by robust data is increasingly seen as a source of competitive advantage in the marketplace. Charlotte Percy, sustainability manager for Apetito and Wiltshire Farm Foods, noted how sustainability performance is a growing feature of public sector tenders in particular, including within NHS England which has its own target to achieve net-zero across all scopes by 2045. At St. George’s University Hospital in Tooting, London, Apetito has worked with on-site caterer, Mitie, to introduce lower carbon menus by reducing the amount of red meat served in favour of lower carbon ingredients. In the three years since the initiative was first piloted, the hospital has reported a 17% reduction in carbon emissions across all the meals it serves. Hanson from WSH highlighted a similar trend among private sector companies to put greater onus on sustainability performance when contracting out catering services. “When I started doing this years ago environmental [indicators] in a bid would be 1% of the score, now we’re looking at maybe 30%, up to 40% of the score,” said Hanson.
