Sustainable nutrition in company and educational facilities as well as prisons

Peer reviewed / Manuscript (original) received: 27 August 2019 / Revision accepted: 17 March 2020

Nutritional and ecological improvements of catering services

Introduction

Nutrition and the reduction of food waste are key issues to meet global challenges such as climate change, loss of biodiversity and the excessive use of limited resources. All Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) are directly or indirectly linked to the food system (production - consumption - disposal) [1]. Global food production threatens climate stability and the resilience of ecosystems. That makes a radical transformation of the global food system urgently necessary [2].

Out-of-home catering plays a central role in the issue of environmental protection through a more resource-saving diet. In 2018, each of the 11.8 billion guests in the German out-of-home market consumed an average of 6.84 € worth of food and drink per visit. Although the COVID-19 pandemic has led to a drop in sales, the out-of-home market remains the second most important sales channel (after food retail) for the food industry in Germany [3]. In community catering, the purchase of large bundled quantities of goods and the recipe design offer just as much potential for optimisation as the preparation and waste avoidance of food.

Abstract

This article presents results from the project “Eating in Hesse – On the culinary path to sustainability”, in which the topics of a “resource-saving and balanced diet” and the “reduction of food waste” were linked. For this, the analysis and optimisation tool susDISH and the Waste analysis tool from United Against Waste for collecting food waste were combined. In cooperation with eight model companies for community catering, 411 recipes were evaluated according to their nutritional value and environmental impact over four to six-week periods. At the same time the food waste in the kitchens was collected. After the baseline survey and the implementation of measures, the follow-up found that the nutritional-physiological quality of 224 recipes was improved and the environmental impact of 112 recipes was reduced. Projected over a period of twelve months, the project achieved total savings of 281.5 tonnes of greenhouse gas emissions, 6 million litres of water and 29.2 hectares of agricultural land through recipe optimisation and waste avoidance. In parallel, the average food quality increased from 10.1 to 10.3 health points.

Keywords: out-of-home dining, company catering, carbon footprint, water footprint, land footprint, ecological scarcity, sustainable diets

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