The Good Food Website

When Melbourne's KeepCup announced its six-ounce cup at Milan's Out of the Box in October, the company was immediately hit with requests for a 10-ounce cup too: a similarly "smaller" version of its large 12-ounce cup that would give latte drinkers a stronger "tall" (figure that out).

The company responded on its blog with the plaintive: "We are trying to create fewer cups, not more …"

At 180ml, the 6oz is designed for evolved coffee palates, says KeepCup's founder Abigail Forsythe. Think of it as an artisan coffee cup, for magics, flat whites, long blacks and - gasp - takeaway filter brews.

But does the KeepCup actually work?

Since 2009, we have bought 3.5 million KeepCups, diverting 3.5 billion disposable cups from landfill, says Forsythe. She adds that many fans own as many as eight and quite a bit of KeepCup use is to carry coffee from the home espresso machine to commuter car cup holder.

The disposable cup numbers are still large - 2.7 million a day in Australia, or nearly 1 billion a year, according to one estimate. Like all large numbers, they generate more large numbers: 1 billion a year in Australia is part of 500 billion manufactured world-wide (we punch above our weight there, too).

Whether a paper cup can be recycled depends on the proportion of plastic to paper. Research by one of Planet Ark's associates found only 50 per cent of takeaway cups used in shopping centre cafes were suitable for even low-grade recycling.

There are takeaway cups lined with plant-derived PLA plastic, which is biodegradable, though in landfill its decomposition is measured in decades, not days.

Then there's the flavour effect of drinking through a lid, sippy cup-style: the reduced aroma input to your senses is one reason coffee tastes different in a takeaway.

Also worth considering is the classic energy input analysis from 1994. Martin Hocking of the University of Victoria in Canada calculated a ceramic cup embodied 14 megajoules of energy, compared with 6.3 for reusable plastic, 5.5 for glass, 0.55 for paper and 0.2 for foam. This means a glass takes 15 uses to break even with paper on the energy budget, and a ceramic cup 39, including the dishwasher energy - doable. But a glass has to be used 393 times to break even with a foam cup, and a ceramic cup more than 1000. So the choice is probably about convenience as much as energy use.

From http://www.goodfood.com.au/good-food/drink/is-there-any-point-to-keepcups-20131123-2y27k.html?rand=1385417596117 on 26 November 2013

Do Australians waste $8 billion worth of edible food each year?

LOVE FOOD HATE WASTE – WORLD ENVIRONMENT DAY

Wednesday, 5 June 2013 marked World Environment Day and the theme of this year’s celebration was Think.Eat.Save, an anti-food waste and food loss campaign aimed at encouraging all of us to reduce our foodprint.

According to Foodwise, a staggering 4 million tonnes of food ($8 billion of edible food) gets thrown out each year in Australia. This equates to around 345kg per household; a total of 34,000 tonnes of food waste if we extrapolate this to the homes of all the people employed in the Australian legal sector.

Whilst the majority of people only associate food wastage with purely a financial cost, the sad truth is there is a significantly higher environmental cost involved. When we discard food, we are also wasting the water, energy and resources required to grow it and transport it to us. The discarded food ends up in landfills where it rots amongst other organic matter and creates and releases the greenhouse gas methane. What most people do not know is that methane is 23 times more harmful than the CO2 pollution from your car exhaust.

Whilst this may all seem trivial, think about it this way (Source: Foodwise & UNEP):

• It takes 2400 litres of water to produce one hamburger
  
• Australians discard up to 20% of the food they purchase – this equates to 1 out of every 5 bags of groceries you purchase
  
• Up to 40% of the average food waste in household bins is food
  
• An estimated 20 – 40% of fruit and vegetables are rejected before they reaches the shops, because they do not match the supermarkets' and consumers’ high cosmetic standards
  
• If you add up all the food Australia wastes each year, it is enough to fill 450,000 garbage trucks. Placed end to end, the convoy would bridge the gap between Australia and New Zealand over three times
  

You might be thinking, what does this have to do with the price of peanuts? But the scary truth is that if we do not mend our wasteful ways, our children will grow up seeing a very different Australia to the one we know and love. We should each take pride in saving our planet, be wiser with food and try to eradicate food wastage both at work and at home.
 

HOW YOU CAN REDUCE YOUR FOOD WASTAGE IMPACT

Here’s a few easy suggestions:

• Have a meal plan and write down a shopping list of what you need before you go shopping. Remember to take into account what you have in the fridge, freezer and pantry.
  
• If your fruit is starting to look overripe, why not freeze it – frozen bananas make great smoothies and frozen raspberries are a great little snack when you need a sugar kick.
  
• If you are cutting carrot tops etc. off your vegetables, why not freeze them and use them to make stock?
  
• If your vegetables and perishable foods are looking like they have seen better days, why not turn them into pasta sauces, curries, baked goods and other meals you can freeze.
  
• Freeze bread that you do not think you are going to use and toast it, rather than throwing it out.
  
• Leftovers are the new recycling! Use leftovers to make new meals.
  
• Buy local, this saves on the carbon footprint of the food you consume.
  

Image: Carbon footprint of food wastage

As George Bernard Shaw once said “there is no love sincerer than the love of food.” He was right; let’s love food and hate waste!

Resources on Sustainable Food

Procurement Guide: Catering

• In-house Catering
  
• Outsourced Catering
  
• Sustainable Suppliers
  
• Food Wastage
  

Download as PDF

Issues

• Understanding your firms catering needs and how best to manage the supply of catering services.
  
• We only have a finite supply of food available to us so it is important to know that we are using sustainable food supplies as much as possible.
  
• Food supplies can be transported to us as close as the local market down the road or they can be flown or shipped in from interstate or overseas. It is important to be aware of the carbon emissions involved in the transport of your food supplies.
  
• How is your food packaged when received?
  
• Food wastage is a global issue, especially within the corporate sector. Are you doing everything you can to minimise your food wastage and therefore managing your catering spend better?
  

Considerations

Identify Requirement

• We will always have a need to provide catering for our staff and clients, be it internally or outsourced. Do you have a centralised and controlled method of ordering your catering or is this decentralised within your firm?
  
• Identify what type of catering do you need to provide - basic amenities, morning teas, sandwiches, fine dining, buffet style, cocktail food?
  
• Do you have the appropriate kitchen facilities on-site to prepare and cook your own food using internal chefs / cooks or do you have to rely on outsourced providers for some or all of your catering needs?
  
• Do you rely on various suppliers or do you have national / international contracts as part of your procurement management?
  

Plan

• Like many areas within an office environment, if not managed properly catering can easily be a source of excessive expenditure. It is best to appoint a key person(s) to oversee and coordinate the catering procurement - this may be a Catering Manager or somebody within your catering area but could also be a Receptionist or a central secretary / administrative role. If you have many different people ordering their own catering then this is very inefficient in controlling cost, quality and quantity.
  
• Set up simple grounds rules for your catering procurement. Centralise your ordering if possible. Set realistic budgets for catering expenditure for each team or department. Ensure meetings are not held unnecessarily in the early morning or at lunch times so that you can manage the expectation of providing staff with a 'free feed'. Ask staff to bring their own food if necessary.
  
• Make sure you are providing the right quality of food to match the occasion. Your morning tea for staff should be basic catering (which will maintain costs) whereby if you are trying to impress clients then consider more appropriate food quality and cost.
  
• If planning an event then allow for a slight drop off in numbers so that you don’t over cater.
  
• Consider 'donating' any left over food to organisations such as SecondBite. SecondBite help identify opportunities of collecting surplus fresh food and produce and facilitate its safe and timely collection and distribution to agencies and people in need.
  

Select

• Review your current suppliers and be prepared to ask them questions about their food supply chain - then be prepared to make decisions based on the following criteria;
  
• is it locally sourced? This reduces carbon emissions and supports local businesses
  
• is it seasonal? Many foods are now produced all year round which means the use of heating and cooling methods which increases carbon emissions
  
• is the food sustainably caught? For example certain fish stocks are now very low globally. Try and use certified fishing practices such as the Marine Stewardship Council (MSC)
  
• is the food GM free? All organic foods are GM free.
  
• how is the food packaged when supplied? Is the packaging bio-degradable
  
• Consider purchasing the following;
  
• Fair Trade goods
  
• Organic food or food from good farm management practices
  
• Free range poultry and eggs
  

Manage

• Ask your suppliers questions and make decisions based on their answers - don’t be afraid to challenge or change your suppliers if you feel this is necessary.
  
• Manage your food waste proactively - the best way to manage waste is to avoid having any in the first place
  
• Small steps - change can take time so be patient
  
• Communicate and promote any changes to staff and highlight the reasons why the changes were made. Seek any feedback from them also.