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Our sustainability journey

Last year, we launched our new Sustainable Food and Drink Policy, outlining our goals and continuing practices from 2026 – 2031. When designing our new Policy, we had two key priorities in mind – for it to be accessible and understandable to our community regardless of their knowledge of sustainability in catering; and for it to be a clear roadmap, with distinct and measurable goals.

Below, we’ve outlined the key policies in each section and what our progress against them. In several cases, we’ve already achieved or surpassed our original aims, and as part of our commitments in the Policy, will review these and set new, more ambitious goals at the start of next academic year.

What We Serve

With the support of the Imperial Sustainability team, we base our actions in science and data, all of which points towards society’s need to reduce meat consumption, move towards sustainably farmed and produced food, and reduce waste. The following policies and actions are designed to do just that.

We want plant-based options to be affordable, accessible and appealing to everyone – whether they’re vegan or not.

• All our outlets now serve a clearly labelled plant-based option daily, and we have made a formal commitment to keep vegan meals the same price as non-vegan.
• We encourage our community to eat more plant-based food, regardless of their diet, through fun campaigns like our ‘Cheat On Meat’ (dis)loyalty cards: during Veganuary and Sustainability Month, customers can collect stamps for buying vegan lunches to earn a free meal. [SE1.1]So far, over 350 such meals have been redeemed.

We are working to increase the proportion of plant-based foods on our menus – both in terms of menu options and the ingredients in them.

• We’re implementing more and more of what we describe as ‘vegan by default.’ We’ve quietly swapped some of our highest volume products to great quality vegan ones; all plain croissants and pain au chocolats in our cafés are vegan, mayonnaise used in our in-house recipes is now vegan. Now, around 30% of our food offer is plant-based, and we’re working towards a goal of 40% by 2031.
• We changed our catering menu structure so only proteins can be swapped; all sides and sauces are vegan by default.
• We’ve increased the plants per portion across many of our meat dishes – through carbon calculation we’ve been able to tweak ‘C’ rated meat dished to a ‘B’ rating by reducing meat from 120g to 100g per portion in recipes.

When we created our first Sustainable Food and Drink Policy in 2022, we analysed our found that meat made up 8% of purchases, but 40% of our carbon emissions; beef was by far the largest - 38% of total meat CO2e.

• We have now eliminated beef from our operations, reducing our total departmental CO2e emissions by 15% in just two years. In popular dishes, we’ve swapped beef for Scottish wild culled venison, which creates drastically less environmental impact.

We committed to purchase British lamb only to reduce food miles, limit lamb dishes in existing menus and not add it to new menu concepts.

• Between January and April of this year, we’ve reduced the lamb consumption by 58%.

Where We Source It

Procurement is the core of our operations – for our sustainable practices to have a real impact, our sources have to be sustainable too. Below are the steps and commitments we’ve made to reduce emissions and ensure we are choosing sustainable products, suppliers and pipelines.

The scale of our operations requires us to handle and store a large amount of produce – we are doing what we can to minimise that carbon footprint.

• We have worked to coordinate suppliers and deliveries across our outlets and business areas, reducing the overall number of deliveries to campus by 18%.
• We continue to consider delivery impact when making any decisions about ordering, storage and menus to reduce deliveries to the absolute minimum.

We regularly review the sustainability credentials of our suppliers and products to ensure the whole supply chain is up to our standards.

• Under Imperial’s new Sustainable Procurement Policy, sustainability criteria make up 20% of the scoring on all major contracts and a minimum of 10% on all others, emphasising the importance of sustainable sources and re-use wherever possible. We have created additional catering-specific guidance for all our procurement staff.
• Our largest outlet, the SCR, is now MSC-Certified. This means we have been audited to confirm that every element of our fish supply chain is certified to the MSC’s high standards.
• We have reviewed sustainability policies and credentials of all suppliers, and are working with them to create goals to improve operations, giving them appropriate time to do so before we seek to find better sources. As an example of this work, we have encouraged suppliers to join NetZeroPositive, increasing the proportion of our suppliers onboarded from 30% to 41%.

We have embedded sustainability further into our ways of working by upskilling staff and empowering them to put sustainability at the core of operations.

• We’ve encouraged staff at all levels to complete Imperial’s new Carbon Literacy Training, created by the Sustainable Imperial team – approximately 85% of staff in our department, from team leaders to heads of department have now completed the course.
• Over the last couple of years, Ella, one of our operations managers has taken on the majority of sustainability projects, due to her passion for the area and the wealth of new ideas she brings. Last year, her job title and description were formally changed to reflect both the impact of her work and the importance of the focus in our department.
• As our department sustainability lead, Ella now engages with the Sustainable Imperial team, sustainability leads in other departments and local sustainable business network South Ken ZEN, increasing knowledge-sharing and extending the impact of our practices and discoveries outside of our department. Ella has also completed the Sustainable Leadership Lab course by the Environmental Association for Universities and Colleges (EAUC) in support of these actions.

How We Serve It

Decisions about the equipment we use in our kitchens, the products we use to serve our food, and what we do with our waste have a big impact; especially given the scale of operations. Through a series of significant swaps and upgrades we’ve reduced plastic, waste and our overall carbon impact.

We have drastically reduced the use of plastics in our operations – as of this year, all of the disposables we offer to our customers are fully biodegradable.

• We’ve removed plastic cups from water fountains and events, and sell reusable Imperial water bottles at all our outlets.
• Our disposable cups and lids have been swapped for Bagassee packaging, made from sugar cane waste and 100% compostable.
• Our new napkins and dispensers are made from recycled Tetra Packs and have also resulted in a 40% drop in napkin consumption.
• Our takeaway boxes are now provided by Notpla, an Imperial alumni company utilising a unique seaweed coating to replace plastic linings. This means all disposable containers are now 100% plastic-free and totally compostable. This switch replaces more than 450,000 single-use plastic items a year, saving around 1,185kg of plastic and cutting 13,300kg of carbon emissions, a year.

We have also worked to reduce single-use items across the board.

• We’re encouraging customers to bring their own lunch container - all our outlets will serve food in any clean reusable container customers bring. We’ve also run a loyalty card scheme twice over the last year to encourage customers into the habit.
• We issued all catering staff and agency workers with reusable boxes for the staff meals they get on shift. Our meal policy now states all staff meals must be served in reusable containers or on plates, eliminating thousands of disposables per week.

We are working to reduce both the carbon footprint and the waste produced in our operations.

Our new Meiko plate wash is up to 38% more energy efficient and uses less water and chemicals than our previous solution. Our new Granuldisk pot wash is projected to save us 1,231 litres of cleaning chemicals, 852,000 litres of water and 30231 kWh of energy annually.

We launched a trial of 12 Big Belly recycling bins on our South Kensington campus. Due to solar powered trash compacting, they hold five times the capacity of regular bins and can be emptied less frequently. In a period of five weeks, we collected 1.8 tonnes of recycling that would have otherwise gone to landfill and are now rolling the bins out across all campuses.

Making Greener Choices

Alongside keeping our staff and ÌìÃÀ´«Ã½ up to-date with our actions, we want to provide the information our community needs to make more sustainable decisions. We’re finding new ways to engage our community around green eating to make it informative, useful and, wherever possible, fun.

We hope to empower our community with the information they need to make greener choices about their food – both at Imperial and beyond.

• We have started displaying the carbon impact of dishes on our menus, as one of the two universities engaging in TUCO’s trial with the MyEmissions Carbon Calculator. This information enables our chefs to plan lower-emission menus, and empowers our community to make informed choices about what they eat. We have already implemented this on all of our permanent menus, with the goal of including carbon information on all menus by the end of 2026/27.
• For sustainability month, we used data from MyEmissions to create a low-carbon pop up menu in the SCR, our highest footfall outlet – this exercise not only helped to demonstrate to our community the kinds of foods that carry low carbon footprints, but also pushed our chefs to create low-impact dishes, encouraging them to add this consideration into their menu planning.
• Our loyalty card schemes – Cheat on Meat and Join the Green Team – have been designed not only to inspire our community to consider their food habits through a green lens, but also to encourage habit-building by gamifying sustainability, rewarding our community for making more sustainable choices.

As well as providing them with more information, we also look to be active with our community, creating spaces for both serious conversations around the environmental impact of food and in fun events, tastings and pop-ups to engage a wider pool of people about green eating.

• One of our newest initiatives is the SPICE forum, open to all ÌìÃÀ´«Ã½ and staff, creating a space for engaged members of our community to come together with decision-makers in our department. A large focus of these meetings will be sustainability, allowing us to test ideas, learn from our community and empower them to become ambassadors for sustainable eating within their departments.
• Following the success of our FFS (Forage For Sustainability) series, we’ve expanded to FFS LIVE – setting up a pop-up kitchen in the heart of campus to teach staff and ÌìÃÀ´«Ã½ how to make Gno-Waste Gnocchi out of aquafaba. Over the course of one lunchtime, we had 75 participants and have already booked in future events.

We are also drawing on the expertise in our community – at one of the world’s best science and technology institutions, we have a wealth of knowledge that can help us on our sustainability journey.

• We are working closely with the Sustainable Imperial Team, and the new Head of Sustainability for the Property Division, to link our work with Imperial’s wider goals, foster new ideas through collaboration and seek out even more opportunities to streamline across departments.
• We’ve utilised the wealth of knowledge and innovation available in businesses founded by Imperial ÌìÃÀ´«Ã½ and alumni, including Notpla and Beyond Belief Brewery, who make beer from food waste – both of which were started while their founders were at Imperial.
• his collaboration allows us to also draw on the knowledge and inspiration available in our ÌìÃÀ´«Ã½ – an arrangement that can be beneficial for both us and them
• We’ve collaborated with Imperial ÌìÃÀ´«Ã½ in several areas to our mutual benefit, including:
  • recruiting PhD ÌìÃÀ´«Ã½ to conduct research on the carbon impact of planned changes. Recent research found that swapping from plastic to canned drinks was actually not the most sustainable choice when the carbon impact was rigorously studied. Understanding this meant we could adjust our approach to be genuinely and accurately impactful. In working with PhD ÌìÃÀ´«Ã½, we also provide a practical testing ground for their research – creating a virtuous circle to support sustainability research.
  • engaging with Sustainable Imperial’s ‘Sandbox’ scheme to involve ÌìÃÀ´«Ã½ from our community in suggesting innovative solutions to sustainability-related problems.
  • working with Imperial’s ‘Dream Team’ to implement pop-up notifications on the My Imperial app, alerting users to discounted food at the end of the day to reduce food waste.

Tackling food waste

Food waste contributes significantly to greenhouse gas emissions. From the resources used to grow and the emissions generated to transport, to the energy and labour used to prepare food; no matter how sustainable the chain of our operations, it’s all wasted if it ends up in the bin.

We’re working to reduce edible food waste from our customers.

• We launched a campaign called ‘Ask for Less’, encouraging our community to take a moment before ordering and consider how much food they really need, asking for less of any element if they know they often don’t finish it.
• We’re in talks with Too Good To Go, and are close to being able to offer leftover food from across our South Kensington campus in the at a reduced rate to reduce edible food waste.
• We committed to reduce plate waste collected in the Senior Common Room by 10% by the end of 2026. Through customer campaigns, waste analysis and menu and portion adjustments, we achieved a 40% reduction from January to April 2026 alone.
• We have placed food waste bins across campus and encouraged customers to take leftovers away if they cannot finish their meals. This initiative has helped raise awareness of waste and empower individuals to take control of their own food waste.

We’re also working to reduce the waste from our operations and ensure that we are re-purposing and recycling wherever possible.

• Ahead of the timeline set in our Sustainable Food Policy, we are now recycling 100% of coffee grounds produced by Taste Imperial outlets.
• The mayonnaise we serve is now made in-house with the aquafaba left over from tinned chickpeas. This saves us 26,000 eggs and 1,700 plastic tubs every year.
• Our filtering system for cooking oil saves 16,000 litres of oil per year and reduces consumption by 50%. This means fewer deliveries and fewer plastic bottles.

We last reviewed our progress towards these targets in July 2026.