#acesustains

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Fantastic initiatives commended at #ACESustains

We had so many fantastic entries for ACE Sustains 2015 People’s Award it made choosing our winner a really difficult task.  The judges wanted to commend these two individuals for their contributions which were over and above what would be expected of them in their day-to-day jobs.

Heidi Notter - Compass - 'Know Your Food' Health & Wellbeing

Heidi Notter drives all of the marketing and engagement around Compass’s ‘Know Your Food’ platform for health, wellbeing and sustainable sourcing.

Her strategic and energetic approach has seen her introducing Health Awareness Tours (850 customer MOT’s completed to date!), a dedicated website and twitter account and a unique partnership with MyFitnessPal, the leading nutritional app for customers to track their food consumption and fitness levels.

Claire Adams - Wellcome Trust - 'ReJunivate'

Claire’s innovative “Rejunivate” project was a challenge set by her Client at Wellcome Trust in an effort to reduce waste across their hospitality services.  

This month long trial saw leaner menus introduced with tighter control over volumes and clients actually changing the way they order food for meetings.  

The resultant 35% reduction in waste (£1,400 / 160kg) means she now has to come up with a permanent slogan for it to stay on the menu!

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Big shout out to the #ACESustains People’s Award Runner Up

Congratulations to Lorna Burns, Brand Manager for KPMG, Restaurant Associates for this fantastic idea - 'The KPMG BIG BUZZ’.

This simple but effective initiative was awarded the runner up award at our summer event on Wednesday.

Here’s a little insight into the idea:-

Lorna’s remit spreads across 22 sites nationally.  When she creates an initiative it has to travel far and wide to make an impact. So when she embarked on setting up 2 beehives on top of KPMG’s Canary Wharf Headquarters, she had to link this to a campaign that promoted it nationally to 13,000 customers.  

She created a story to tell, to raise awareness and communicate the reasons for having bees and the benefits.  The BIG BUZZ has become an internal brand name and through honey tasting tables, honey themed menus and recipe cards, this campaign was communicated successfully to the entire business.  

This concept is simple, but nonetheless effective.   Beehives are not new, we know, but they are critical.  Bees in the UK are endangered, so every contribution helps.  The estimated cost of colony collapse in the UK is set at around £1.8 billion

What’s important here is that what she did is making a difference!

The Prize (Sponsored by ACE):

Urban Foraging Experience for 8 people with foraging expert, John Rentsen

John Rensten lives and works in London.  In 2004, he opened a successful gastro pub, The Green, in Clerkenwell EC1 and soon found that he could combine his love of foraging with his enthusiasm for running a busy eatery.  

He doesn’t have the pub anymore but since then, and on a daily basis, he studies wild food, picks wild food, obsesses about wild food and loves sharing what he has learnt, running city foraging walks and taking groups mushroom hunting in The New Forest or combing the seashore in Dorset.  

He set up Forage London to give city dwellers like us a chance to enjoy and discover some of the amazing wild foods that grow all around us.

Find out more at http://www.foragelondon.co.uk/about-us/ 

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Well done to the team at Bartlett Mitchell

Congratulations to Lin Dickens, Marketing Director, & the “Green Bee” team at Bartlett Mitchell who won the People’s Award at this year’s ACE Sustains.

Here’s a little insight into why this initiative won

“Read your Wrap”

Bartlett Mitchell have found a really clever way of communicating with their customer base, that touches almost everyone, almost every day.

Lin Dickens and her team came up with the idea to produce a newspaper style greaseproof sandwich wrap that they can print their “Fruitful World” stories on.  This is, in essence, a newsletter that contains information about local suppliers and key company initiatives that support their environmental programme.  

Printed on biodegradable paper, using vegetable inks, this rustic and artisan style of presentation has the added benefit in that it reinforces their natural, wholesome approach to food and gives them an ideal opportunity to promote the ‘green’ initiatives and lifestyle that they encourage to customers.

The Objectives:

• Inform and educate customers on the benefits of eating sustainable food at the point of purchase • Cost effective - saving £5,000 per year in printing customer newsletters, and yet more in not printing marketing collateral such as table talkers and cards. • Focus on issues critical to the business and environment • Educate customers • Reducing carbon footprint by reducing waste, emissions and printing, whilst contributing less to recycling or even landfill

What a great idea to capture an audience, so that whilst they are enjoying their lunch, they can read about sustainable clean water projects in Africa and perhaps be persuaded to buy Thirsty Planet water in support.

We like the fact that this is an easy, innovative initiative that shows customers their options, without telling them what to do!  

The Prize, which was sponsored by Pelican

The Tasting Menu for 4 people at Michelin-starred Fera at Claridge's.

Renowned chef Simon Rogan's ever-changing tasting menu captures the true essence of nature through textures, tastes and a sense of perpetual evolution. Using the finest organic ingredients, harvesting them in their prime, they combine them with sensitivity and ingenuity, often revealing unexpected new dimensions.

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New venue for ACE Sustains 2014

Last year the Association of Catering Excellence (ACE) held the first ACE Sustains competition, presenting a new industry award that recognises the companies and individuals or teams that stand out in the food service sector for innovation in their approach to sustainability and corporate social responsibility. The winners were Caterers Linen Supply, due to their environmentally friendly steamless laundry, their pledge to reduce linen miles and their innovative range of recycled EkoChef clothing; and Caroline Meledo from Sodexo for initiating a company-wide scheme to recycle coffee grounds in biodegradable packaging made by prisoners at HMP Peterborough.

Entries are now invited for ACE Sustains 2014, with the winners announced at the ACE Summer Event, which will take place at London Zoo on Wednesday 16th July. The Zoological Society London (ZSL) runs conservation programmes worldwide and works with local communities to promote sustainability.

The deadline for entries is Friday 25th April. If you or your company are working to create a more sustainable way of doing business, don’t miss this chance to shout about it. Here are just some of the entries that were commended last year:

Bartlett Mitchell at Asmec introduced the concept of reusing coffee clutches by creating a loyalty card scheme whereby the clutch is stamped 12 times in return for a free coffee.  This initiative is both entrepreneurial and environmentally friendly in that it saves money on clutches and loyalty cards and reduces waste simultaneously.

Lusso’s team at Investec won approval for their unique Ugly Fish Friday concept, that celebrates fish approved by the Marine Stewardship Council and highlights the issues facing the UK Fishing Industry. 

The Clink Restaurant at HMP Highdown is a charity committed to reducing re-offending rates through specialised skills training such as Horticulture, Bee-Keeping and Catering. The Clink also promotes self-sufficiency and reduces their carbon footprint through robust waste management and recycling programmes.

Vacherin worked at engaging the voluntary commitment from individuals actually operating in full-time roles within their business to drive and support their sustainability initiatives. Gerard Jacob had a worthy mention for heading up their ‘Vacherin Cares’ programme, which is embraced by the whole team.  Lexington were commended for their Sustainablity & Community “Star Awards’ programme, as was Gram UK for their “Green Paper’ research and report initiative that has become a point of reference for the entire foodservice industry.

Debbie Rosher, representing last year’s winner of the Corporate Award, The Caterers Linen Supply said “We heard about the competition at an ACE event, and thought we should enter, having built our new factory 3 years ago. But we never thought we’d win! We use 70% less water than a standard laundry, and the staff are all on board with our sustainable initiatives. We’ll keep going and continue to look for new innovations.”

Jeni Edwards, organiser of the event and ACE’s chair said “We were overwhelmed by the quality and number of entries we received and the standard is now set for an even bigger and more exciting competition next time. There are a lot of fantastic sustainable initiatives out there in the catering industry, and we want to celebrate that. It will be interesting to see how businesses and people rise to the challenge now and continue to come up with new and innovative ways to implement change and make a difference.”