While we often report on the delicious discoveries happening at Hive, we must also acknowledge that currently a third of the food produced globally is thrown away or wasted in the process.
It is time for a change!
In line Unilever's Future Foods commitments, we want to halve food waste in our global direct operations by 2025. This begins with education and collaboration, which we know quite a bit about at Hive!
Recently, our grounds welcomed a team of changemakers all based at the Wageningen Campus to join the “Waste Free Week - Wageningen Campus Lunch” centred around sustainable and implementable practices we can do to minimize food waste. Our guests were greeted with warm welcoming words from our colleague and consumer scientist Rene Lion and WUR representative Sanne Stroosnijder, programme manager of the Food Loss and Waste Prevention. The programme began with an informative presentation from our hospitality manager Angelique van Bijnen, who was representing Eurest.
How does this exactly translate into practice? Well, to quote Angelique “we do that with a lot of love and passion”. At Hive, Eurest practices seasonal cooking, thereby ensuring that ingredients needed for the recipes are selected according to the current season. To further minimize food waste, the team also cooks the same fruits and vegetables multiple days in a row by simply reinventing the initial recipe and donates fresh food to different humanitarian initiatives.
Chef Antonio completed the programme and taught the guests about how minimizing food waste does not necessarily begin where you think it would: in the kitchen. Instead, it begins with our mindset! Antonio reminded the audience how we are responsible for being more conscious both in our private, but also professional lives. Linking his tips to Hellmann’s Make Taste Not Waste campaign (you can read more here), he notes how by cooking seasonally and better managing our food we already contribute to positive change.
Chef Antonio also pointed out how our chefs use our in-garden compost systems for leftovers, a circular process which eventually fertilizes the soil used for growing our herbs and vegetables!
In the spirit of the event, the guests were then invited to a “take it yourself” lunch at Hive’s food court, as they eagerly discussed the challenges of banqueting.