Support the Community: Fooditude

“Sustainability matters,” says Cristina Covello, Head of Strategic Growth at Fooditude. “It matters from a moral perspective: we all want to be doing better for the environment and for our communities, and to build a more sustainable business. It’s our belief that doing this work will also create a stronger business that can withstand any turbulent times.” 

Indeed, making sustainability a priority has contributed to Fooditude’s longevity as a business. “It’s a great marketing tool,” Cristina says. “I started at Fooditude about 11 years ago as a Marketing Manager, and the sustainability work we were doing gave me great stories to tell. That’s part of why we signed up to The Sustainable Restaurant Association. It’s important to be able to talk about all these great things that we do in a way that is credible and without greenwashing.”

How Fooditude supports the community

Fooditude is a fantastic example of how food businesses can work closely with their communities and create relationships that benefit everyone. Having grown over the years, the organisation is a significant presence in their neighbourhood. “We’re very loud on the street – our sign is bright turquoise and takes up a full block! – so it’s important for us to find ways to contribute and engage,” says Cristina. Through relationships with organisations like the Southwark Education Business Alliance and ELBA, they build connections, provide volunteering opportunities for their staff and create local jobs – even using these relationships as a method for recruitment. 

Their longest-standing community partnership is with Highshore School, a nearby educational facility for students with complex mixed needs. Since 2013, about 26 work placement students have completed either single-term or full-year work placements in Fooditude kitchens, as drivers or front-of-house. “Over the years, we've actually hired three of those students into paid employment, and two of them are still with us.” Fooditude also hosts career days for Highshore and donates a cake every World Book Day. 

The relationship with Highshore has had a particularly impressive and measurable impact, and it’s what gives Cristina the most pride. “Being able to hire three people into paid employment might not sound that exciting, but for these students and their parents as well, it is a really big deal. We’re very proud of that and of the fact that we’ve been able to keep the partnership in place for so long. You know, different people come and go and head teachers change, but we have kept that relationship strong throughout the years.”

While Highshore is their cornerstone community partnership, there’s plenty else going on. Newham College sends its own students for work placements through The East London Business Alliance. “We also do quarterly cooking demonstrations with Centrepoint,” says Cristina, referring to the UK's leading youth homelessness charity. “We've done food waste demos, vegan meals, mocktails, dumplings – fun events to get young people interested in hospitality.” 

The Fooditude team also works with local charity United St Saviours, which has just launched an innovative social housing project for people over 65, called Appleby Blue Almshouse. “They have a community kitchen and we’ll be hosting workshops there. Our first one is this May: we're going to do a cooking demo with youth from an organisation called XLP that helps young people from disadvantaged backgrounds to stay in school and start thinking about their careers, and then serve the food to the seniors who live in Appleby Blue. We're also setting up a soup kitchen there; we'll go in weekly and use surplus food from our kitchen to make a soup or some sort of easy hot meal, and then serve it from their community kitchen.”

During the pandemic, they really saw the fruits of their labour. “We had been building community relationships for a long time when the pandemic hit. We’re a workplace caterer, so suddenly we had zero business – but we were able to pull on those connections when it mattered. We had a huge kitchen that we needed to keep active, we had all these furloughed staff that were happy to volunteer and we had our community connections.” The Fooditude team ended up serving 50,000 meals over lockdown. “We couldn't have done that if we hadn't already built up those relationships in our community.”  

Food Made Good at Fooditude

When Cristina started at Fooditude in 2013, she was eager for the brand to become associated with having a positive impact… and community was a big factor here, too. “Once we found The Sustainable Restaurant Association in 2014, we knew we wanted to sign up and join a community of other like-minded businesses.” 

The Fooditude team soon found that the Food Made Good Standard was much more than just an accreditation: it’s a process that can offer guidance and inform strategy. “Once we did the Standard, we started using the three pillars [Sourcing, Society and Environment] to create our strategy – this is straightforward because the final report includes recommendations for what you can do. 

“This became an operational document. We could decide what we wanted to accomplish under each pillar by the end of the year, and then look back later and have a clear overview of whether we did that or not.” Having this structure in place was a big help, especially in those early days. “We're still a fairly small business, but back then we were very small – we didn't have a sustainability manager or anything like that. The Standard really helped us to take an organised approach.” 

A bottom line business impact

She mentions an even more direct positive impact of the Food Made Good Standard on business at Fooditude: their biggest customer has been with them since 2014, when they found Fooditude through The SRA. “They were small then, but they're big now and that's how they found us – not by Googling, but through our listing on The SRA website. It's had a bottom line business impact, which is always great for justifying all this work to financial directors.”

Cristina advises any business signing up for their first Standard to be really honest in their evaluation. “You want an honest result so that you can genuinely make improvements. Put the effort in because it's worth it, and allow yourself sufficient time to do it well. You've got to collect information from so many parts of the business, so bringing it all together does take time.” She emphasises the power of leveraging the results and final report. “Once you’ve finished the evaluation, use it! Use the results to your advantage. Shout about it. Use it as an engagement tool.”

This is advice put into action at Fooditude: their work across the three pillars of the FMG Standard is reflected in their communications to prospective clients (through proposals), current clients (through regular newsletters and quarterly reports) and customers, on their social media channels. 

They also now have their own sustainability manager on board, who maintains direct communication with their clients and works on sustainability projects and initiatives with them. “We've got a Sustainable Snack programme going on right now,” Cristina shares. “Our sustainability manager has set up her own criteria for scoring our snack and drinks. She puts them through her system and gives them a red, yellow or green rating for sustainability, and that's how we display them on at our client sites.”

Looking forward at Fooditude

Next on the agenda is to tackle Scope 3 emissions. “We're also members of Planet Mark,” says Cristina, “and they audit our Scopes 1 and 2 emissions. Now it’s time for us to venture into our Scope 3. To help with this, we have joined EcoVadis. This platform assesses supplier practices, giving them valuable data and a chance to collaborate for better environmental impact across the supply chain.” 

As outlined in our Renewable Energy Solutions Toolkit for the F&B sector, they’re also leading the way in the transition to renewable energy and actively working towards Net Zero 2040. They’re exploring retrofitting and upgrading their power supply and installing a battery and solar panels to generate and store their own electricity on-site. Having bought an electric van and with plans to install EV chargers on-site, their goal is to have a fully electric fleet by 2030. Down the line, they’re even talking about using a bidirectional EV charger to make use of surplus energy from their own vehicles.

The team’s work to reduce food waste is ongoing. Internal engagement remains one of the biggest challenges, says Cristina, but steady and continuous improvement is the name of the game. “Anything that requires a change in behaviour can take some time to sink in. That might be waste segregation or even just chopping things in a different way.” They’ve recently started using a data analytics reporting system to understand food waste at a deeper level and to track trends. “This lets us talk to our clients about how waste is being created and make suggestions for how we can change that.”

Alongside all this work to reduce their footprint, Fooditude’s community involvement remains at the core of the business; one of this year’s goals is to increase staff volunteer time and build ongoing volunteer programmes with local charities. Meanwhile, at the time of our chat, two new Highshore students have just started their work placements at Fooditude, the latest participants in that long-standing partnership.

Read more about Fooditude’s commitment to sustainability and to their community at their website. Interested in the impact the FMG Standard could have on your business’ bottom line? Drop us a line at standard@thesra.org any the team will be happy to answer any questions you might have. You can learn more about the Standard here.