The Lever Report: Actions for Food service businesses and their clients to achieve Eating for Net Zero

Sodexo UK&I recently announced a comprehensive roadmap to net zero and decarbonisation of their business in the United Kingdom and Ireland, with targets such as increasing the number of plant-based meals and recipes to 33% by 2025.

Since then, Sodexo Group are developing their Net Zero strategy. In setting this strategy, Sodexo Group has also developed, tested, and are now scaling a carbon trajectory tool. This will act as a user guide to assist countries and segments to define their carbon reduction programme. However, further fixed actions, targets, and KPIs are still needed for the food element of the net zero strategy. The range of actions (levers) that are available to pull upon to achieve carbon reduction goals and helping to bend the curve on nature loss will require action not only from individual companies but wider multi-stakeholder collaboration between industry, government and third sector organisations.

Within Sodexo's sustainable actions, there is a need to work closely with clients in different segments to ensure that there is an alignment in commitment and actions towards goals, so that impact is translated at the till-level. There are barriers and actions needed for this require exploration and identification.

Project Aims:

The primary aim of this project is to develop a report on the key collaborative actions (levers) that food service businesses (such as Sodexo) can take alongside their client segments (institutions of universities/hospitals, businesses in private and public sector) to support sustainable diet offers, across all areas of food but with a focus on a shift to more plant protein sales. This must be aligned with net zero trajectory and should cover Sodexo's main global markets of UK, France, USA, and if within scope, also cover China and Brazil.

The report must primarily (1) be practicable and useful for food service and their clients, considering dynamics of this relationship, the barriers of each party and laying out actions to take (or levers to pull on) to support them.

In addition, the report will be used to create an (2) external facing client engagement tool, to be used by Sodexo staff as a blueprint for how to work with clients to engage and gain commitments on sustainable diets. This would ideally also act as an advocacy piece and encourage wide change across the food sector. Therefore, all work within (1) should bear this usage in mind.

Please see word document for further information.