Find out more about our sustainable food and events policy.
Sustainable Food Policy
Our aims
Lancaster University’s Food & Dining team is committed to delivering an exciting variety of food with passion and purpose to enhance the student, staff and visitor experience. We offer food that is tasty, sustainable and affordable to the university community, focusing on healthy and nutritionally balanced meals. Our team focus on seasonal menus for catered accommodation, conferencing and events using fresh, locally-sourced produce. Following the growing trend in plant-based menus and customer desire for information on the provenance of their food, fresh ingredients are sourced from local suppliers (where possible) maximising the quality produce Lancashire has to offer. We work closely with all our suppliers to improve the sustainability and reduction of packaging used.
What we do
These are some of the existing food policies. We are constantly looking for ways to be more sustainable and reduce plastic use.
Meat, Fish, Dairy and Eggs
All meat is from farms which satisfy UK animal welfare standards, serving red tractor meat only, with the exception of cured meats. All fresh eggs are Lion stamped from free-range hens. No fish is served from the Marine Conservation Society ‘fish to avoid list’. Milk comes from a local dairy (10 miles away) and cheese comes from Dewlay Cheese in Garstang (8 miles away). Dairy-free alternative milk is available in all outlets.
Plant-based food
Local and seasonal fruit and vegetables are used for conferencing and catered accommodation menus. Conference lunch menus focus on plant-based ingredients. Daily Pre-school Vegan lunch options are provided free from all the 14 major allergens. Vegan and vegetarian options are available at all outlets.
Drinks
Free drinking water is available in all units along with water fountains on our campus. We serve fair-trade or ethically sourced tea and coffee across campus, with most of our tea and coffee sourced from Atkinsons Coffee of Lancaster (4 miles away). We offer a keep cup scheme with a "latte levy" for using takeaway cups.
Waste and recycling
We work with the BSI 14001 minimum standard – wastewater, disposing of oil and recycling responsibly. Our campus catering deliveries are made using electric vans reducing CO2 emissions. We are reducing deliveries from our major suppliers onto campus to 3 days per week to reduce CO2 emissions. All consumables are fully recyclable.
Digital assets
We’ve shifted our marketing activity away from printed materials into almost exclusively digital assets, changing from paper to digital feedback forms. We’ve also introduced a digital system in our kitchens to cut back on paper wastage; our kitchen team now use a live digital screen for schedules and menus, instead of printing them.
Dietary Requirements
We are Allergy Aware, holding an Allergy UK Accreditation across all our outlets and services on campus. Menus are also provided for all dietary and most cultural needs across the university.
