Congrats to the British Street Food Awards Sustainability Winner 2024!

WHY LOKI POKE WON THE SUSTAINABLE STREET FOOD AWARD 2024 

Dishing up healthy bowl food from a shipping container in Bristol’s CARGO, Wapping Wharf, Loki Poke impressed our judges across all three pillars of Sourcing, Society and Environment. 

Most of Loki Poke’s main ingredients are traceable back to farm or fishery. Their meat is 100% organic and locally sourced from Stream Farms – a farm that practices sustainable and regenerative farming – through a collaboration with Beast Co., a local family butcher. They’ve started buying their salmon from Loch Duart, a low-impact Scottish farm that prioritises fish quality while maintaining a low carbon footprint. We particularly loved their initiative to swap sashimi tuna – typically sourced from the Indian Ocean or the Western Pacific Ocean – for Hampshire Chalk Stream Trout, a locally sourced, sustainable alternative. Not only have they updated menus to reflect this change, but they also ran an awareness campaign to encourage customers to try the sashimi trout.  

When it comes to social sustainability, Loki Poke is collaborating with the Mazi Project to raise money through the addition of a special item to the menu. The Mazi Project works to empower marginalised 16- to 25-year-olds through food. Staff at Loki Poke are also provided with paid time off for volunteering, facilitating more contributions to the community. To support public health, they’ve removed refined sugars from the menu and adapted the recipes for their sauces to use natural sugars instead. They’ve also made efforts to eliminate gluten and gluten traces from the menu.  

With an event catering offering alongside their regular service, we were also pleased to see that Loki Poke has used carbon footprint software to analyse their events menu, helping them to rethink and change some of their ingredient choices with emissions in mind.  

We’d like to extend our congratulations to Loki Poke for this fantastic work! You can learn more about the other shortlisted businesses below. 

THE 2024 SUSTAINABLE STREET FOOD AWARD SHORTLIST 

• Saving Nemo: This vegan ‘fish’ and chip shop in the North East supports small businesses, sourcing vegetables from a local greengrocer and seaweed from a small Scottish company. Owner Jess volunteers with British Divers Marine Life Rescue and Hessilhead Wildlife Sanctuary and donates leftovers to charity. 
• Cheeky Burger: This London-based burger van transitioned to regeneratively farmed beef sourced from The Ethical Butcher and supports smaller game suppliers, even at a higher cost. 
• Loluli’s Fire and Fish: Working with local fishers to serve the freshest catch of the day, the team at Loluli’s is careful to purchase only what’s needed to eliminate waste. They choose seafood based on spawning and ecological seasonality and use often-overlooked options like legal by-catch and fish bones. 
• Planet G: This plant-based business in Scotland pickles ingredients in-house to reduce food waste while using their social media to educate on sustainability. 

ABOUT THE BRITISH STREET FOODS AWARDS 

The British Street Food Awards were founded 15 years ago by Food Mutiny, the events company started by award-winning food journalist and broadcaster Richard Johnson. In the years since, while street food became an increasingly important and much-loved part of the UK’s food scene, the Street Food Awards have become the number one competition for mobile food vendors in the UK. The European Street Food Awards launched in 2017, followed by a US launch in 2023, bringing this celebration of different cultures and cuisines further across the globe.  

This year’s BSFA champions will go on to compete in the grand final of the 2024 European Street Food Awards in Germany.  

HOW DO WE JUDGE THE SUSTAINABLE STREET FOOD AWARD? 

Our team of consultants at The Sustainable Restaurant Association was proud to be judging the Sustainable Street Food Award once again – an award created to recognise a street food vendor who is going above and beyond to ensure that their food not only tastes good, but does good too. The entry questionnaire for the award was designed to provide an overview of sustainability practices and is based on our Food Made Good Framework, assessing a business across three focus pillars: Sourcing, Society and the Environment. 

You can read more about the Food Made Good Framework here. For more about the British Street Food Awards and this year’s winners, head to their website! 

Header image from Loki Poke's website.