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A tool to help caterers reduce climate impact

News
27 Oct 2023

We’re always looking for ways to support our customers in their drive to be more sustainable, especially when it comes to food services. We know that caterers want to reduce their impact on the environment and make a change to more sustainable practices.

At a recent LACA event, we saw a demonstration from the Soil Association – a public body established 75 years ago – on a product called Cool Food Pro. It’s an app to help you monitor and reduce your carbon footprint as well as manage food costs. Let us tell you a bit more about it…

What is Cool Food Pro?

Cool Food Pro is a free, web-based carbon calculator which enables caterers to reduce their environmental impact through changes to their menus and purchasing. The environmental savings calculated are easy to view, allowing caterers to understand the impact they are making with the food they serve.

The Cool Food Pro calculator supports caterers to move towards more sustainable practices across five key areas:

Organic
Local
Seasonal
Less and better meat
Food waste

A range of free downloadable resources from the Cool Food Pro website and optional in person support provide information and guidance to help caterers reduce their impact on the planet.

How does it help caterers become more sustainable?

Across Cool Food Pro’s five key areas, caterers choose actions, taking as few or as many target areas to suit their organisation. This includes reducing meat on the menu, reducing food waste and buying more local ingredients. Using the calculator, they choose the practice they wish to improve, for example reducing food waste, enter in their current practice data to get a baseline, model a potential change to see the resulting environmental savings and then commit to the target. Caterers then make the changes and every subsequent month enter in the new data to see their CO2e. savings as well as their impact on water quality, biodiversity and financial savings.

Darran McGregor, Chef Manager at Gather and Gather said ‘It’s a very ‘cheffy’ tool – it’s just banging in a few numbers off a spreadsheet. It’s easy to manage, easy to use – you choose!’

How does the carbon calculator work?

The calculator estimates the impact of climate-friendly changes based on major trends and estimates. It gauges Scope 3 indirect emissions linked to the production of a product, its use, and its end-of-life.

Who can use Cool Food Pro?

Cool Food Pro can be used by all public and private sector caterers and is already being widely deployed across the education sector in both schools and universities. NHS settings, the care sector, staff restaurants, commercial catering sites, and independent businesses are also signed up and actively using the calculator. The flexibility of the tool means that it’s accessible to any size organisation. During the initial 2-year project co-financed by Interreg, support from the Cool Food Pro team was designated to caterers in a specific funded area. Soil Association Food for Life are now supporting a national roll-out of the programme.

Consultancy support

Caterers are now able to subscribe to annual support packages or choose ad-hoc consultancy support to suit their needs. Offers include online training on the carbon calculator, onsite delivery of educational workshops, presentations or assemblies, and case studies created by Cool Food Pro. Free downloadable resources such as posters and menu labels are available to download from the website to ensure clients and customers are aware of the work their caterers are doing to reduce their impact on climate and nature.

Cool Food Pro has become an invaluable tool to caterers– not only to drive forward changes to reduce their environmental impact, but also to demonstrate to customers the commitment they’re making to serve climate-friendly meals.

YPO’s frameworks

Don’t forget to check out our food frameworks where you can set up contracts for the supply of all different types of food. The frameworks offer a compliant way to procuring food with many other benefits.

Food Deal DPS - Category 5, Fresh Fruit and Vegetables - 985

Food Deal 2 – Direct Award Solutions - 1114