This is the equivalent of around 185,500 meals going to organisations including FareShare, Olio and Too Good To Go. Compass has also converted 753,252 litres of cooking oil into biofuels.
Ashleigh Taylor, head of environment at Compass Group UK & Ireland, said: “It was estimated there was 10.7mn tonnes of food waste in 2021 – accelerating global warming, wasting water, energy and valuable resources.
“Stop Food Waste Day allows us to raise awareness of the environmental, commercial and social impacts of this important issue and showcase our chefs’ creativity to reduce, reuse and repurpose ingredients – preventing food waste through recipe redesign. It’s great to see the huge support globally for this initiative, as reducing food waste is a necessary, collective responsibility.”
Across Compass, its businesses are driving redistribution. Highlights include:
- One Retail – saved 83,552 meals and avoided 225,500kg of CO₂e using Too Good to Go across the lifetime of the partnership.
- ESS - 66 sites donating pre-packed products and fresh fruit and veg that are close to their use by date. Since July 2023, 39,522 items of food have been saved.
- Levy UK + Ireland – almost 20,000 meals saved, since January 2022, through Olio partnership, one of many community sharing platforms Levy use to re-distribute its unserved food.
Saasha Celestial-One, chief operating officer and co-founder of Olio, added: "It's encouraging to see such a major player in the catering and hospitality space leading the way in redistributing surplus food.
“For Stop Food Waste Day 2024, we're reflecting on the incredible impact we've been able to achieve together - we've rescued hundreds of thousands of meals in the UK and Ireland since we first started working together in 2019 and fed thousands of families with that food – having an impact on the planet and supporting those in need.”
Stop Food Waste Day was launched by Compass Group USA in 2017 with the aim of raising awareness around reducing food waste. Compass Ireland continues to partner with DigiTally, a digital food waste tracking solution and 89% of sites are now recording food waste daily.
Eurest has developed a series of Stop Food Waste Day recipes, used across hundreds of sites and for customers to use at home - they utilise ingredients which often get wasted including cauliflower stalks and vegetable peelings.
Chartwells has continued to work with the next generation, sharing the importance of avoiding food waste with their Beyond the Chartwells Kitchen workshops in schools. Its culinary teams developed a series of video and recipe banks for frontline teams, to reduce food waste.