The Global Lessons in Greener Catering

Operators in the UK and Ireland’s hospitality sector are no stranger to green catering. The Sustainable Restaurant Association’s Food Made Good standard, WRAP’s Guardians of Grub and the rollout of Simpler Recycling have all pushed the industry on over the years. Look overseas, though, and a handful of operators are working at a level we rarely match. Here’s what they’re doing and how their thinking travels back home.

The Closed-Loop Kitchen

In Bali, Locavore NXT diverted 98.4% of its waste from landfill in its first year, an achievement that won it the 2025 Asia’s 50 Best Sustainable Restaurant Award. A purpose-built circular waste centre with a hot composter, plastic shredder and more than 20,000 worms processing sewage sits alongside solar panels that deliver 30% of its power and a fermentation kitchen that turns trimmings into new dishes. Few caterers here could build that from scratch, but the transferable idea we can take from it is to measure waste at sourcethen design it out, one stream at a time. Start small by:

Weighing and logging waste by type before changing anything
Turning one recurring offcut into a menu item rather than a bin liability
Sending unavoidable scraps to composting or anaerobic digestion, not landfill

Scale, Without the Premium

In Copenhagen, there are approximately 900 public kitchens, feeding nurseries, schools, hospitals, elderly homes and prisons which operate using around 85% organic ingredients – and they did it inside existing budgets. They offset the premium of
organic food by serving less meat, cooking from scratch and cutting waste, before reinvesting the savings they made.

The lesson to be learnt here is that more plants and less waste can fund better sourcing rather than blow the budget. For public-sector caterers, it’s a proven route that’s worth investigating.

Carbon Labelling

Menu transparency is where overseas operators are pulling ahead fastest overall. In New York, Just Salad became the first US chain to carbon-label its menu and reported just under a 10% increase in sales of low-carbon dishes after launching its Climatarian filter. In Sweden, the platform Klimato gives caterers an A to E climate rating per dish, and its hotel clients report a similar yearon-
year lift in green meal sales.

When looking abroad for inspiration, the best international operators treat sustainability as an operating system, not a bolt-on. None of it demands the investment of a Balinese worm farm, it needs a starting point from which to grow.

Carbon Labelling in Four Steps

The costed recipes you use for pricing carry the same ingredient data a carbon calculator runs on.

Choose a tool that fits your scale, such as UK-built Foodsteps or Sweden’s Klimato. Both turn a recipe upload into an A to E rating
Rebalance the heaviest dishes and move a low-carbon option to the top of the menu, where it sells
Label the dishes simply with A to E per dish on a menu, board or app, and add a QR code to provide detail
Follow the CMA Green Claims Code, comparing within your own menu, evidencing every figure and avoiding “eco” claims you can’t back