Catering and hospitality is an industry known for its high pace service and perfect presentation. Sustainability can often take a back seat — but not here. At Portfolio Events, we believe that great events shouldn’t come at the planet’s expense. That’s why we’ve been making conscious changes behind the scenes to run greener, smarter, and more responsibly.
Sustainability refers to the ability to maintain existence. Our environments, ecosystems and climate are facing a rapid deterioration due to human activities and primarily the burning of fossil fuels. We want to do whatever we can within our company to ensure our activities are beneficial to our long term environment and eliminate or reduce practices that are harming our environmental sustainability.
We are always thinking of how we can improve our approach to catering environmentally. From recycling to reducing food miles, we believe there is plenty that can be done within the catering industry.
Portfolio Events are taking steps toward sustainability by using more environmentally friendly alternatives across our operations. We are actively adopting sustainable practices wherever possible, some that are already in place involve:
Portfolio Events use all local suppliers. We are very proud to be able to claim that our meat and dairy produce come only from UK farms. Following this, All fish on our menu is also MSC certified and our ingredients are red tractor certified.
100% of the power used in our office, warehouse and kitchen is British and from renewable sources. All our crockery and cutlery is washed by our amazing warehouse team so it can be reused. This means we do not use any single use – plastics within the company, only wooden or paper disposables where needed. We have also recently introduced electric vehicles to our fleet.
We have always provided a menu that changes with seasons and seasonal produce. This helps to support local economies and reduces the transport of ingredients. 60% of our menu has vegan or vegetarian options – Plant based diets produce significantly fewer greenhouse gasses than diets rich in animal products.
Here at Portfolio Events, we recycle all paper, glass and plastic. We also try to reduce paper usage as much as possible and have moved 100% of our correspondence online. We also recycle all our food waste by donating it to local farmers to use for pig food!
We do not like to see anything go to waste! Around 10,000 meals per year are donated to homeless charities and food banks. For every guest we feed at an event, we produce a meal for charity. We work with companies such as Food4heroes, Hope and daylight centre.
Although we are very proud of the steps we have made in improving our operations, we believe there is always more that can be done regarding being environmentally sustainable. We are actively looking into multiple new approaches within our company.
In the near future, we want to provide ‘PE’ metal water bottles to all our staff. This will encourage our team of employees to stop purchasing single use, disposable plastic-bottles and to reuse the metal ones provided.
