Building a Sustainable Food Strategy
During our B Corp certification process, we worked with Carbon Jacked, a UK-based consultancy dedicated to helping brands reach net zero. They assessed our carbon footprint across all areas of the business and the insights from the food report were fascinating.
As we know, the emissions associated with meat are much higher than plant-based alternatives. Consequently, we’ve increased our use of venison and other game meats, which has a lower environmental impact than other meats such as beef, lamb and pork and can actually be classified as carbon neutral as long as they’re sourced from the wild rather than farmed, like our venison and game bird supplier, South Brockwell Farm. This approach to reducing meat consumption is also in line with the recent UK Government Food Strategy (released in June 2022), which urged the adoption of alternative and more sustainable sources of protein, including those from “non-traditional livestock sectors” such as wild venison.
Interestingly, Carbon Jacked identified that our use of beef had a massive impact on our carbon emissions which was an easy thing to address. The current method of counting the carbon footprint of beef doesn’t account for how it is grown; there are obviously poorly performing farms and better ones with open fields where cattle are free to graze on grass or forage. It proves that not all beef is equal so when it comes to counting emissions, beef has nearly four times the carbon footprint of a chicken, and that is predominantly due to how a lot of the world’s meat is produced. It seemingly counts its emissions from the cattle in methane and not any of the carbon that, properly managed grass-feed farming, removes from the atmosphere. Even so, with the reduction in the volume of beef we had been purchasing, we managed to save 55.5 tonnes of CO2e (2022). Not only does this lower our carbon footprint, but it has been interesting in raising awareness among our customers, employees and suppliers. There’s also merit in buying the whole animal and using it all.
Supplier Spotlights
We use Flying Fish in Cornwall as I have worked with them for many years and have built up a trust in both the quality of the fish and their sea fishing credentials. We only want to use fish that are in good supply and are caught without harming the ocean. Flying Fish can tell us with full accountability where and how our fish were caught.
A suppliers we have started using more often over the last year are Harry and Sam at SHRUB. All of the farms they work with are operating in a fully ethical, sustainable and thoughtful way, looking after the land as well as growing incredibly flavourful, interesting vegetables. It can be challenging as a restaurant to place a large enough order with each small farm to make it worthwhile and energy efficient to deliver it. Shrub solves this problem by collating the produce from lots of small-scale farms, often locally around the Sussex and Kent boarder and then introduces us daily to the best ingredients on offer. This drives our inspiration for the menus and brings the freshest ingredients to our customers.
This summer we designed a vegetarian ‘Dine in the Vines’ tasting menu using the produce from Shrub which was a real highlight of the summer.
