Liverpool Hope University commits to providing a high quality catering and hospitality service. We recognise that the procurement, preparation, and serving of food and drink in our outlets have a large impact on the environment, and we are committed to reducing this impact as much as possible.
Catering seeks to provide a healthy, nutritious, culturally diverse and sustainable menu choice for our customers. We are committed to provide fresh home cooked food, and will change dishes to use the best products that the season has to offer.
UK households alone waste £12.5 billion worth of good food and drink each year, costing the average family with children £60 a month. This is an unnecessary waste of money, energy and natural resources which went into the production, storage, preparation, packaging and transportation of that food. If we reduce the amount of food we throw away, we could save the equivalent carbon emissions as taking 1 in 4 cars off the road (Love Food Hate Waste).
In the news:
A community food project brought a group of Liverpool veterans and their families to the University’s Nutrition Labs for a cookery lesson with a difference.
- Bring your own mug to purchase a drink in any Hope outlet to avoid paying an extra 25p for a takeaway/single use cup.
- Purchase one of our KeepCups and get 5 drinks free!
- Bring your own water bottle and fill up Fresh Hope, EDEN cafe, Chapters Cafe, Health Sciences Foyer, and Hope Park Sports Foyer.
- Buy more local and seasonably priced produce to reduce both costs and your food miles. Eat Seasonably shows what produce is best to eat and grow now.
- We throw away 7 billion tonnes of food and drink each year, costing around £60 per month, and more than half of this could have been eaten. Check out Love Food Hate Waste for practical tips about a range of food-saving measures: from planning to food portioning, and from better food storage to using leftovers.
- Check out Love Food Hate Waste’s portion planner to work out how much food you need to cook for each person (whatever their age) in your household, for each meal. This will save time and money, as well as reducing the amount you might be throwing in the bin.
- Choose free range and responsibly sourced food.
- Drink tap water instead of bottled. Bottled spring water is more expensive and has a substantially greater carbon footprint than tap water.
- Use reusable cups and glasses for meetings in preference of disposable drinking cups.
- Buy and use organic tea and coffee, if possible; less CO2 is emitted by organic farming.
- We collect food waste from Our Place to allow us to divert our food waste from the general waste stream
- We provide free drinking water within Fresh Hope, EDEN Cafe, Chapter's Cafe, and Health Sciences and Hope Park Sports Foyers.
- Our default catering option is vegetarian - make sure you check dietary requirements of your guests before ordering
- We have embedded sound ethical, social and environmental practices both when procuring goods and services required for the delivery of hospitality across all of our food outlets, and when preparing and serving food and drink to our customers
- We have signed up to the Sustainable Fish Cities and will only use sustainable sourced fish in all of the catering outlets and within our hospitality provision.
- Fish that has been identified on the Marine Stewardship Council’s "fish to avoid" list is not served within any catering outlet, and we maximise the use of fish on the "fish to eat" list
- We commit to promoting the MSC certification of our seafood produce in all our menus and communications, and will include the Sustainable Fish City icon
- We have been awarded Compassion in World Farming's Good Egg Award
- All eggs (in shell) are free range, and we are working towards using higher welfare eggs in all of our products
- The University collects its waste cooking oil, which was converted into bio-fuel by Olleco
- The soup, salad and hot drink takeaway containers/cups are compostable. They still, however, need to go in the general waste bin.
- We are using the last of our plastic cutlery, stirring sticks and straws around campus
- We are looking at how we can reduce the need for them (using metal cutlery, for example, or charging for their use)
- Looking at the provision of biodegradable alternatives
