After 10-years of successful collaboration Sodexo has renewed its partnership with global independent conservation organisation, WWF, to focus on reducing its environmental impact and achieving its carbon reduction target.
Since 2010, WWF has supported Sodexo with improving its sustainable food offer and purchasing practices. The partnership pairs WWF’s technical expertise and thought leadership on sustainability with Sodexo’s global market to protect and conserve the Earth’s resources by reducing the impact of Sodexo’s operations on the environment. WWF’s partnership with Sodexo presents an opportunity to make a positive impact on the health of the planet as well as the health of Sodexo’s consumers – and to drive larger changes in the food system.
The renewal of the partnership is a part of Sodexo’s corporate responsibility roadmap: Better Tomorrow 2025.
Maria Outters, Group SVP Corporate Responsibility Sodexo commented: “Working with WWF has enabled us to set credible, science-based and ambitious targets to align and drive our environmental efforts all across Sodexo. As we start this next chapter of our journey together, we will continue to aim to reduce our environmental impact and provide more sustainable options for our consumers, while striving to move the needle and bring about much needed change throughout the industry.
“The complex challenges we face today require us to collaborate to find solutions, and to work with the full range of stakeholders, whether NGOs like WWF, our suppliers, our clients and other partners.”
In 2019, Sodexo set itself an ambitious and challenging Science-Based Target (SBT) to effectively reduce the Group’s carbon emissions by 34% by 2025. In doing so, Sodexo became the first company from the food services sector to align its carbon target with the aim of the Paris Agreement to limit global temperature rise to 1.5°C.
In order to achieve this ambitious objective and improve sustainability in the company’s operations, Sodexo and WWF are working together on the following workstreams designed to reduce impact on natural ecosystems:
Increase the share of “low-carbon” menus: the Group seeks to rebalance its food offer and increase the share of sustainable proteins and plant-rich foods in its menus (target of over 30 per cent of plant-based meals in menus globally) as well as acting on different strategies to encourage guests to choose more sustainable plant rich options.
Source responsibly: Sodexo and WWF pursue their work on the responsible sourcing of land commodities and seafood. Sodexo was the first catering company to develop its Sustainable Seafood Sourcing strategy and it has been implemented in all its countries. Looking forward, Sodexo and WWF are working on implementing a Group-wide policy to fight the deforestation and conversion of natural ecosystems for critical raw materials (soy, palm oil, beef and paper).
Reduce food waste: as part of its corporate responsibility roadmap Better Tomorrow 2025, Sodexo has been working for several years to reduce food waste, notably through the deployment of WasteWatch. This program has already saved the equivalent of 4.8 million meals. With the renewed partnership, WWF will continue to provide Sodexo with its expertise in food waste management to support the Group’s goal: reduce global food waste by 50% by 2025.
Raise awareness and mobilise all employees, including managers, sales teams and operational teams to enable Sodexo to achieve its sustainability objectives. The partnership will also include a program to improve awareness, progress reporting and action plan definition at operational levels, for example, leveraging a new Site Engagement Assessment tool at the site level named SEA.
