By Katherine Price:
It’s been a difficult month to stay positive in the face of extreme weather events highlighting the dangers of a warming planet.
As well as fatal wildfires and storms in Europe, Antarctic ice hit record low levels for June and a new study suggested the Gulf Stream could collapse as early as 2025.
Given our understanding of the food supply chain’s contribution to greenhouse gases, some students have set their sights on the environmental impact of their institutions’ foodservice offering. Plant-Based Universities is campaigning for university catering facilities in the UK to transition to plant-based menus to limit their contribution to the climate and ecological emergency.
Following a series of similar votes at universities across the country, including at Stirling, Cambridge, Queen Mary, Birmingham, and London Metropolitan, students at the University of Kent voted to remove animal products from catering facilities at the end of June in what has been reported to be a record-breaking voting turnout for the Students’ Union.
As a result, the union will commit to its food offer becoming 50% plant-based by the 2023-24 academic year, transitioning to plant-based by 2025, and lobbying the university’s catering facilities to do the same by the 2027/28 year.
But what does this mean for university caterers and what are the opportunities, and challenges?
“It reflects an interest by the student population, it tells us what our students want,” says Tim Burrows, the university’s catering operations manager, who says it has been an exciting development in student engagement with the food offering.
“It’s always been a challenge getting quality feedback. We do various things; we survey our students. But we’re always hungry for opinion and feedback, good or bad, and this vote by the union has started conversations everywhere: with the union, Plant-Based Universities, with the press and our suppliers.”
The university’s outlets provide plant-based options of course, and has a plant-based loyalty scheme, but Burrows says they plan to market these more widely, which will be the next step for him and his team.
“We need to get better shouting about what we do already,” he explains. To this end, Kent Hospitality is developing a plant-based micro-brand called Silence of the Yams, which will manifest as both an outdoor pop-up catering unit on-campus and a new range of grab and go items.
“Historically, we’ve offered the option to make a non-vegan dish vegan by doing switches, and that’s not good enough now, that’s giving a message that our primary audience is non-vegan… We’re going to stop doing that and start putting plant-based items more prominently in our offer,” he adds.
The opportunities are clear – meeting a vocalised student demand for plant-based food and creating a more environmentally sustainable offering. The challenges Burrows faces will be to balance this financially, ensuring that a plant-based offer does not outprice its customers, or result in an operational loss.
He says that to transition to a plant-based offering overnight would be a “very high-risk thing to do” from a financial perspective for the catering department, and so the initial focus will be on more extensive marketing of the plant-based options.
“Once we’ve done that and feel that it’s being given an equal footing in terms of our marketing, then let’s see what the sales and financials are doing. But it has to be a gradual process as we explore in a financially responsible way how we can meet this demand. We’ll be responsive to both the student voice but also to what our sales data tells us,” he says. The department will then look at possible targets.
Burrows is reassuring about concerns expressed in local media following the vote that moving to a plant-based offering could mean less choice for those with allergens or dietary requirements.
“Allergens are enshrined in law and part of everything that we do,” he explains. “We shout about the allergens that are in our food, and if we had a student who arrived and made us aware of a particularly severe allergy, we take them to meet our chefs so they’re identified, and we have a conversation about how we can meet their needs. Whether it’s plant-based or not is beside the point.”
In the meantime, the team is also working with its suppliers both in terms of what products they can provide and recipe development to widen their skills and knowledge in this area.