The 2030 Sustainable Development Goals and the Paris Agreement on climate change have made it crystal clear that businesses everywhere have a huge role to play in rapidly transforming our world for the better. It’s also clear we need to shift to much healthier and more sustainable diets, in order to achieve the commitments to ending malnutrition and fighting climate change. Workplace food is just one part of that puzzle, but it has a lot of potential, and has not yet received the attention it deserves.
The business case for sustainable nutrition in the workplace
From a health perspective alone, the business case for employers pushing better diets couldn’t be clearer. Malnutrition and diet-related ill-health (e.g. type 2 diabetes), linked to too much food and the wrong foods, are an accelerating global phenomenon, with being overweight now affecting more people than hunger.
In the UK, two thirds of adults are overweight and 28% are obese1 It’s the worst rate in Western Europe, and projected to keep rising. British diets are surprisingly poor: 75% of adults are not getting their recommended five portions of fruit and veg a day, we’re getting far too little fibre, too much sugar, fat, salt and protein, and too many calories overall. The implications for society include healthcare costs of billions of pounds. As for the workplace, poor eating habits are reported to cost employers around £17 billion a year, or 97 million lost working days.2 A company with 1000 staff could be losing £126,000 a year in productivity due to obesity-related problems alone.3
We get at least a third of our daily calories at work4, a clear opportunity for employers to influence staff eating habits, health and wider wellbeing.
While there are interesting new approaches to foodservice emerging (such as the Soil Association’s Catering Mark, Sodexo’s Green and Lean meals pilot for schools, or US Compass Group’s partnership with vegan supplier Hampton Creek), they’re far from the norm, and so there are big opportunitites for employers and caterers to influence diets for the better, through canteens and vending machines at offices, factories and other work sites.
What solutions are available to get it right? And what are the benefits for employee health, staff engagement in sustainability and for wider corporate sustainability goals? It’s a topic we’ll be exploring with UK employers and foodservice providers in London on 17th May (and elsewhere around the world later in the year), in a joint event with the Soil Association.
So what about wider sustainability?
Following the Paris Agreement, every responsible business now needs to move quickly to protect itself from climate risk and reduce its carbon emissions. Food and farming have a huge role to play in radically reducing global emissions, for example by capturing carbon in farmed soils, reducing livestock emissions and eliminating food waste. Opting for lower-carbon catering is a no-brainer, with potential for engaging staff on sustainability and climate questions. Importantly, increasing demand for sustainable options will also enable foodservice providers to do more to scale up their own efforts.
Sustainable food is of course about far more than carbon. Many food production challenges are also closely interconnected with human health and nutrition, from climate change making staple foods less nutritious, to the overuse of antibiotics in livestock farming worryingly reducing their effectiveness in human medicine.
Conversely, many interventions that are good for environmental sustainability are also great for health and nutrition. In the foodservice context, examples include reducing food waste by serving smaller portions and reinvesting the savings into better quality food; serving seasonal menus with a greater quantity, proportion and variety of locally grown veg, from farms actively reducing carbon emissions and restoring soils, through organic or similar practices; or serving less but better quality meat, high in animal welfare and low in antibiotics.
As an employer, you could make changes to your workplace catering that not only improve your sustainable procurement credentials and help drive sustainable foodservice more widely, but also encourage your workforce to eat more healthily and to engage with sustainability topics. So with both the business case and sustainability benefits so clear, what can you do to get it right? Luckily, if you’re a UK-based employer or a foodservice provider, we’ll be investigating the opportunities and solutions at our event on 17th May. If you can’t come or you’re outside the UK we’d still love to hear from you. Contact us to find out more!
Image source: Larry Hoffman
