Sustainable know-how

As one of the leading contract catering companies in our industry, we understand the important role that we play in the wider community and the responsibilities that we collectively hold to ensuring that we promote sustainable and ethical business practice.

We see our CSR activity as part of our core everyday business practice, embedded across every area that we touch and are involved in.

We believe that CSR cannot be identified by a one size fits all approach, which is why we work closely with all new and existing clients, as well as our staff, to ensure that we are treating every single scenario and relationship individually.

As an independently owned business, we are flexible enough to be able to make business decisions that are based on a tailored assessment of issues such as environmental impacts, as opposed to working towards a predefined policy that may not be suitable to our very diverse range of clients and venues.

Because of our relatively small size compared to many of our competitors, we are able to source individual suppliers based on quality, freshness, proximity and price; rather than using national logistics carriers to supply a range of frozen alternatives. In many cases, we are able to source local specialities through local farms and dairies (subject to a health and safety due diligence exercise), allowing us to provide entire menus based on local produce.

We understand that, as a food business, there are many areas of sustainability that we can have a significant impact on and, as such, have continuously worked with our clients, staff and customers to ensure that we are doing all we can to minimise our environmental impact and help nurture a sustainable business approach.

For example, through various techniques and approaches, we have developed a thorough audit process with regards to matters such as local sourcing.

Our policy is clear; we will always work with our clients and suppliers to take advantage of locally grown produce where possible.

This isn’t just to support the UK farming industry, or ensure that our environmental impact is minimised through shorter transportation methods, but actually, because we believe that this also helps to maximise taste and the quality of our food. Good CSR practices make sense on many levels.

In addition, we ensure that we have strong relationships with suppliers who can help us procure products that meet our exacting sustainability standards whilst ensuring that it doesn’t place us, or our clients, at a commercial disadvantage. We understand that we need to be innovative enough to be able to ensure that we are combining ethical business practice with commercial know-how.

It is also through our relationships with our suppliers that we are able to work towards reducing waste and encourage the use of packaging made from renewable sources without comprising on food safety or quality. To ensure that both our business and our suppliers are adhering to the high standards we expect, we regularly subject ourselves to marketing testing to ensure competitiveness across our supply chain and are proud to have been recognised for these processes via the various ISOs accreditations that we hold, such as ISO 14001 for environmental management, which recognises our company ethos regarding sustainable procurement, recycling and disposal of waste materials.

Understanding the supply chain is hugely important to our business, which is why also we regularly audit our systems ourselves. It is through this understanding that we have been able to identify where and what we procure for our customers. For example, our systems have enabled us to be able to ensure that we are able to procure sustainably, efficiently, and ethically.

As such, we will always ensure that we trade in an ethical manner whether it is in relation to labour or product sourcing; procuring fair-trade produce is a priority for our business.

We have also identified suppliers who are able to support us by providing produce that has been recognised by the Red Tractor Scheme, ensuring that we are able to trace food from farm to fork and ensure that the meat we procure, for example, is reared to independently audited standards of welfare and husbandry. In addition, all our meat processors are EU licensed and have HACCP accreditations.

This extends to the procurement of our fish across the business, where we are looking to help tackle the decline in fish stocks across the world by identifying a range of sustainable alternatives that have been sourced from fisheries that have been through Marine Stewardship Council auditing processes.

We believe that it is the duty of all businesses and corporate citizens to look at their behaviour and make changes wherever possible and support wherever they can. This is a fundamental part of why we make great effort to support the Crown Foundation, a registered charity set up by our parent company the Crown Group, which aims to support the communities that we collectively operate in.

Every year, via the Foundation, we donate money to a number of charities and good causes, including the Make-A-Wish Foundation and the Forces Children’s Trust. Money is raised through fundraising activity by our staff, customers and clients.

We’d be happy to talk you through more of our initiatives.