Waste No Food: Hawksmoor

Sustainability is the right thing to do 

“Sustainability is just the right thing to do,” says Will Beckett, Co-Founder at Hawksmoor. “To my mind, there’s an unquestionable ethical logic in trying to run your business sustainably and leave as light a mark on the environment as possible.” He goes on to highlight that making sustainability a priority across operations has an enormous impact on recruitment, retention and staff satisfaction. “We’re building something people want to be a part of. That includes suppliers and guests, but mostly it’s about our employees. The people who work here really care about this stuff, and it’s part of how we can keep doing a great job for them. It allows us to attract and keep absolutely brilliant people who care deeply about our planet.” 

Will doesn’t buy into the common misconception that sustainability reduces profit margins. “I find that argument particularly frustrating, but it is embedded in how a lot of businesspeople think,” he says. “In our experience, there’s a real financial argument for sustainability, and it often goes hand in hand with managing costs.” At Hawksmoor, they’re continually proving this perception wrong. “We want to be best in class. It’s important for people to have role models in the industry – we’re far from being the only ones, but we take the responsibility increasingly seriously.”

The challenges of being a sustainable operation

One real challenge that Will does take seriously is that being a leading business in this area can create extra pressure to excel in other areas. Other challenges Hawksmoor have faced but continue to overcome include:

• Sustained behavioural change. “It’s necessary to educate and share knowledge with the people who can impact consumption at sites: both customers and employees. Do people care enough to turn off the lights when leaving a room, stop running the tap when washing vegetables or use fewer paper towels to dry their hands? It’s all about education.”
• Being clear around which changes will actually have a discernible impact, versus things that sound good but might not actually help. “As an example, at a recent event, someone suggested that we could plug our bar fridges storing non-perishables into a timer socket so they’d switch off between midnight and 8am. In fact, the energy to restart the fridge and get it back up to temperature would outweigh the energy saving of turning it off overnight.”
• Tracking emissions throughout the supply chain is one of the biggest challenges for any F&B business. “Scope 3 emissions are particularly high in our industry, and difficult to control while also maintaining quality in your supply chain.”

Preventing food waste at Hawksmoor

Will and the team feel strongly about food waste. “This is a really important issue in our industry – both ethical and financial. We pay to buy food, pay to store it and then pay to throw it away! Tackling and talking about food waste can also highlight some great role models, give practical guidance to people wanting to improve and fosters a sense of community around an important issue.”

Here are just some of the ways in which Hawksmoor works to prevent food waste.

• Menu engineering. They make a point of creating dishes from food that would otherwise be wasted. “One example is our Sticky Toffee Sundae, which use the delicious bulges of sticky toffee pudding that are trimmed off after cooking,” Will says. “Our ever-popular starter, Potted Beef & Bacon with Yorkshire Puddings, is made with steak trimmings left after from butchering and preparing the cuts.”
• Small things add up. “One example is that we place each bowl of Caesar salad we serve in a large tray before finely grating cheese over the top. Any cheese that escapes is collected on the tray and used to make Caesar dressing. On a busy day, this can save 100g of cheese in a single restaurant.”
• Great staff recipes. “We work with suppliers to think about how we can use potential food waste to make delicious family-style meals for our employees. The recipes/menus have much more flexibility than our à la carte menu.”
• Working with suppliers who care. “For example, our beef supplier is obsessed with using every piece of the animal: hide for leather, guts for pet food, tendons for instrument string – even the red and white blood cells are separated and sold on for use!”
• Embracing technology. “As well as lo-tech solutions like encouraging customers to take home ‘doggy bags’, we embrace smart systems that can help us forecast and order as accurately as possible, monitor inventory and use stock rotation to optimise stock management and minimise surplus.”
• Training and inspiring. “To date, 150 of our managers have been given sustainability training and practices to minimise food waste. Training takes place within the restaurants on a daily basis.”
• Smart use of data. “When we think about food waste at Hawksmoor, we’re all about data, carefully weighing each scrap, bone and carrot peel. This helps us to create specific targets to reduce our food waste, and the same goes for energy use and water waste,” he says. This approach has resulted in a host of recent projects, including an ongoing water reduction project aiming to cut water waste by 30%.
• Healthy competition. “One way we use data is to foster a little healthy competition among the restaurants. We even calculate the amount of cling film we use per customer per restaurant. Suddenly, each restaurant wants to be the top of the leader board for minimising cling film usage!”

One initiative of which they’re particularly proud is their Green Team, which, among other things, suggests ways of preventing, repurposing and redirecting waste. “I am proud that this isn’t something that is just ‘top down’ or siloed,” says Will. “The Green Team is a key part of how we embed this thinking across the company as a whole.” Where food waste can’t be prevented, all of it is sent for anaerobic digestion and turned into bio gas.

Food Made Good from the get-go

Hawksmoor has been involved with The SRA since the very beginning. They took the Food Made Good Standard in its earliest days, and are now the company with the longest consecutive three-star accreditation in the hospitality industry. “We got involved because we were passionate about it, but by no means experts, and we wanted to improve,” says Will. “With so many people making ‘green’ claims, it really helps customers to have accreditations that help them understand who is truly walking the walk as well as talking the talk.”

Will advises any business considering the Standard to start the process today. “You only really need two things – a willingness to get started, and a desire to be better tomorrow than you are today. Let those two things be your guide – why you’re involved and how you can improve from here. Try not to let perfect be the enemy of better.”

Talking the sustainability talk

Hawksmoor’s key accreditations play a big part in how they communicate their sustainability practices to the consumer. In addition to their three-star Food Made Good Standard, they’ve also been accredited as Carbon Neutral, B Corp and in the USE part of the Green Restaurant Association. “We keep these front-and-centre, and then try to make other things available for those who want them. We talk about our purpose or the key things we’re doing, and we publish an annual impact report.”

He notes that some customers really care about accreditations. “Others like to know it’s happening but don’t want the details; some just want great steak and chips served by amazing people,” he says. “Even with the latter group, we want them to make a link between a brilliant experience and all the sustainability work we do behind the scenes. They are inextricably intertwined.”

What’s next on the horizon for Hawksmoor?

Next on the agenda is to do more work with suppliers on delivery supply chains to minimise waste, packaging and trucks on the road. They’re also continuing on their journey to net zero and working with some incredible carbon-positive farms. “That’s something that can only be done in a measured, scientific way, and is our next big goal,” says Will. “We’re already carbon neutral, but that’s easy. Reducing our Scopes 1, 2 and 3 emissions is the long-term objective.” At the moment, a big part of this work is learning, sharing and promoting best-in-class practices among the farmers in their network.

As mentioned in our Renewable Energy Solutions Toolkit for F&B Businesses (for which Hawksmoor was a valuable case study), they’re also busy electrifying their kitchens and introducing more sustainable water heating systems.

Learn more about Hawksmoor on their website. To understand how the Food Made Good Standard can improve your business’ bottom line and improve operational efficiency, drop us a line at standard@thesra.org or read more about the Standard here.