Celebrating one year of our Sustainable Food Action Plan
We won the “Benefitting Society” Award at the 2024 Green Gown Awards in recognition of our work as the world’s first Right to Food University.
This award recognises the powerful and innovative ways that education institutions are realising their purpose in society to benefit the lives of individuals, communities and wider society.
Singling out Kent in this category, the judges said that the Right to Food is: ‘A very well thought out and planned programme, addressing a critical societal issue at present'.
The University’s Sustainable Food Steering Group has worked all year on implementing the first year of our ambitious 2-year Sustainable Food Action plan which brings together our work as a Right to Food University, our catering strategy and our progress towards embedding sustainability into every part of catering from procurement to how we operate our kitchens.
Overall, we have achieved 20 out of the 36 objectives in the plan and have partially achieved a further 8 while we are still working towards the remaining 8 objectives. Highlights have included the ongoing success of the cost-of-living meal and progress in increasing the number, variety and quality of Plant-Based meals on offer.
As a Right to Food University, we have been working to ensure that our staff and students have access to regular, affordable, fresh and nutritious meals. Our cost-of-living meal is incredibly popular and during the last academic year we sold over 50,000 of our £3 hot meals where at least 2 portions of veg are always available. We also introduced our own in-house produced sandwich meal deal at a lower price than the co-op equivalent and ensured that fresh fruit is always an option for the snack.
We have made progress in transitioning towards more Plant-Based diets. At the beginning of the 2023/24 academic year less than 1/4 of our main meals sold were vegetarian or vegan but by the end almost 1/3 meals sold did not contain meat. We hope to improve on this figure in the coming year focusing on our cost-of-living meals where 3/4 of the meals offered will be vegetarian (11%) or Plant-Based (65%).
You can see some of our exciting plant based meals and options here.
Our commitment to supporting students through rising living costs has reached a new milestone!
We held a free breakfast for students, funded by last year’s Giving Week, which raised £18,000.
Take a look at the amazing plant based options you can find in our outlets.
Our loyalty scheme rewards you with a FREE meal for every 9 vegan meals purchased in our outlets.
Our catering teams have worked closely with staff from Sustainability and the Estates waste team to tackle food waste at every stage. Firstly, we regularly review our menus and stock ordering processes to ensure we only order what we will use. Switching to centralised production of meals and sandwiches has reduced the amount of waste from the production of meals on campus.
Where we do produce food waste this is segregated and used either on-site in the KentCOG rocket composter or sent-off site for anaerobic digestion and this is monitored monthly to ensure we remain as efficient as possible.
The University is working towards encouraging SMEs and social enterprises to compete more effectively in tender processes. This will be reflected in our new internal procurement processes which will be informed by the new procurement regulations coming into force in early 2025.
We have embedded sustainability across our procurement developing bespoke questions relating to carbon emissions, supply chains, biodiversity, packaging and circular economy. We are also increasing the staff and student voice in how we choose our suppliers, holding supplier showcases and inviting staff and students to meet producers and suppliers.
In partnership with Produced in Kent, we have established the Canterbury-gleaning collective.
Local business garage Coffee is now the official coffee supplier for the University of Kent.
In October 2023 we hosted the Kent Food summit which saw over 100 stakeholders come together.
Chef Ben Elsbury and the Res Life Ambassadors have been running cooking demos with gleaned produce.
We promote food produced in our region in our outlets as well as celebrating Kentish produce though events. As sponsors of the Taste of Kent Awards we hosted the taste of Kent food festival in June 2024 showcasing over 50 amazing award finalists.
We have recently introduced a new Kentish banqueting menu as part of our internal catering offer featuring local cheeses, fruits and juices, and locally reared meat.
Over the last year we have regularly reviewed the promotions available and made sure these are promoted in all of our outlets. All outlets now have consistent messaging on discounts such as the 10% off hot drinks with a reusable cup and loyalty schemes such as the Plant-Based loyalty card.
We are working towards improving this over the coming year and exploring options to promote sustainability further across our outlets.
We won the benefitting society category of the 2024 Green Gown Awards for our Right to Food work.
Read more about our Right to Food project and the 4 missions.
Our sustainable food and wellbeing project in partnership with East Kent Mind.
Find out more about catering at Kent and the work of our catering team.
