Before attending TASS’s Sustainable School Food Summit at COP28 in December 2023, we believed that supporting local suppliers was the best way to minimize our carbon footprint. However, we emerged from the conference with a more nuanced and dynamic understanding of how we can effectively contribute to sustainable school catering.
As a result, we partnered with Klimato — a UK-based agency and one of TASS’s partners at the conference that evaluates recipes based on their environmental impact, considering the provenance and type of ingredients used, as well as the preparation process. We began the long and arduous task of collating and inputting all our recipes (over 1,000!) into their system, and receiving feedback on each one. Then came the real challenge: we discovered that our top-selling sandwich, the Turkey Cheese Croissant — that throngs of children and teachers ordered as their breakfast staple every day — received a grade ‘D’ on the Klimato scale. This posed a true test for us. It’s easy for a business to claim sustainability as a goal and to attend conferences, but what should we do when, as often happens, sustainability comes at the cost of profit?
At Leela’s Lunches, we have always held ourselves to a higher standard of quality, efficiency, health, and nutrition. But does that extend to our sustainability goals, too? We decided that it should. Rather than focusing on other poorly-graded dishes that are less popular, we recognized that removing this one sandwich would be the most efficient and impactful way to improve our average score and reduce our carbon footprint.
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