A host of the UK’s most iconic sporting events, including the Six Nations, the FA Cup Final and the Cheltenham Gold Cup, are set to provide fans with cutting edge carbon footprint information about the food and drink they choose to purchase.
The move comes thanks to a new partnership struck between Freemans Event Partners, the UK-based multi-service event partner, and food sustainability experts Klimato. The deal will allow carbon labelling information to be placed on menus provided by Freemans Event Partners at venues including Wembley Stadium, Lord’s Cricket Ground and Twickenham Stadium.
The Klimato tool enables calculation of the carbon emissions created by each and every menu item that Freemans Event Partners provides. Meaning that the 15m guests across 400 events each year that the company caters for will be able to clearly see the carbon impact of the food and drink they choose.
The carbon impact of food is measured in kg of CO2e, a standard unit for measuring greenhouse gas emissions. For example, a typical beef burger might score 4.0kg CO2e, while a portion of fish and chips might score 1.8kg CO2e and a vegan falafel salad might score 0.4kg CO2e.
At the same time, Freemans Event Partners is undertaking a full review of its menus in order to update any existing recipes that score highly, where possible switching out certain ingredients or cooking methods to a more sustainable alternative. This will ensure as many dishes as possible have a low score and reduce the overall carbon footprint of the food and beverage offer at any event.
Simon Hanna, Chief Operations Officer, Freemans Event Partners, tells Wholesale Manager about the partnership with Klimato and what benefits Freemans gets from being a member of Confex.
Tell us about Freemans. What does the company do?
We’re very unique in what we do. We’re a multiservice event provider. We work at pretty much every major, venue and stadium sporting event in the UK, and we specialise in delivering outstanding services, whether it be food, beverages, technology, procurement or logistics. The ultimate end game is to deliver a best-in-class fan experience that our clients demand. We serve over 15 million people a year in over 400 venues. We are expanding into Europe now, having been very British based. We’ve done the Ryder Cup and Commonwealth Games in the UK. We do further work with Formula One. And there’s a big event in France this summer that we’re working on as well.
What other clients and brands do you work with?
We’re very lucky. We do a lot of work with Twickenham. We also do the London Stadium and Wembley, our partner there is Delaware North, a contract caterer. We’re just starting to do work at Murrayfield in Scotland, stretching a bit further north, which is very exciting. Formula One Silverstone is our longest serving client. We’ve been with them nearly 50 years now. We do the horse racing at Cheltenham Racecourse Gold Cup, which is very close to my heart, having come from there. We do the Grand National, Badminton Horse Trials and Burleigh Horse Trials. At all these venues we deliver food, beverages and technology, but ultimately our procurement logistics arm supplies it all.
What plans do you have to grow your business?
The most appropriate one for this interview is our Foodservice division. We have a very long-standing team and long-standing business model. But as our business has grown, our procurement logistics arm has grown with it. We supply all our food, all our bars, our concession areas, our catering units, and clients directly as well. I think it was our logistics director who alluded to our procurement business being Amazon for events. We’ve got a central office in Gloucester that distributes to wherever our clients are. But for our biggest events like Silverstone, we set up our own logistics department, in a warehouse in Silverstone. All our concessionaires, our caterers, our bars, the clients themselves, they know what our stock lists are, they can give us an order on the day, and they’ll receive it that day. If they give us the order at the end of play, they will have it for the start of play the next day. That is a 24/7 service to 150,000 people a day at a venue at which we’ve got over 400 outlets, which is pretty forefront in our industry.
Do you rent the warehouse temporarily for the event?
We’ve got a warehouse at Silverstone. And then we set up temporary areas for alcohol, for example, we’ll have temporary chilled units for the beers and the wines, etc. We’ll have a protected warehouse for all food. We have walk-in freezers and fridges, we’ve got distribution vehicles, we’ve got a forklift, we’ve got low loaders. We’ve got everything there ready to distribute around site. We operate over 400 outlets there. Pre-event, they’ll have our list of what we’re serving, what we’re arranging, what they can get, what they can order, and that will be ready for them.
What benefits do you get from being a member of Confex?
Confex is good for us. It gives us exposure and gives awareness to brands. We’re quite lucky in that a lot of brands come to us. But Confex exposes us to other brands we may or may not know about. It gives a good pricing benchmark to understand what’s going on in the industry, who’s doing what, and making sure we’re getting the best deal for us and ultimately the best thing for our clients. It gives us exposure to supply chains we may not have.
Tell us about the partnership with Klimato. How will the partnership raise awareness of carbon emissions?
It’s something very close to me, actually. I brought it in during my time in Jockey Club. As with anything, you have to get your message right. We’ve had so many clients try and balance their CO2 targets and their net zero targets. But Klimato was a tool that I thought was very informative. It’s not telling you what to do or how to do it. It’s just giving you very simple metrics which you can look at and understand if you want to do something better for the environment. You look for the low or the medium rated products and avoid the high. Ultimately, you may have a high at the venue but will have low at home because you understand what you’ve had. It’s just an information tool. It’s a very good point for us as a business as well as internally. Because we load all our menus onto Klimato. So, you have your standard, your procurement where we source the product, we test the product, we verify the product, we price the product, and then there’s a new strand that we’re adding in the Klimato tools. We input all the details for a burger for example. And it will flag that it’s very high because it’s beef. Then we’ll put a chicken burger in and all of a sudden, we get a benchmark as a business as to where we’re moving. Are we buying too many products that are high in CO2 and are being distributed too far? We’re banning air freight and basing more products around local breweries, as opposed to things flying in an aeroplane from around the world. So, it gives us a benchmark and decision to make internally which transfers onto a display for the consumer.
Do you worry this initiative might have a negative impact on sales as consumers might be put off from buying a burger, for example?
Well, when I when I first put it in, I put it into a racecourse, obviously a very meat heavy venue and you think, oh no. But since we’ve started using it, our sales haven’t dropped off. We see a mixed change because some people do understand that and want to make that change. Calories are displayed on the menu as well, it will make you have a cortado instead of a cappuccino, because you see the difference in the calorie content. Klimato makes people make a different decision sometimes. And ultimately the longer we go through this process as an environment, the more these things will come to the forefront and people will be looking actively for a CO2 register as they do for calories now.
What else is Freemans doing in the area of sustainability?
We’re quite lucky that a lot of our clients have already started because of the nature of their sport or their game or their entertainment, they have to have the jump a lot earlier in this and they’ve made a lot of pledges for being net zero. So, our strapline is pretty much moving towards net zero, depending on where we’re operating and what that venue is doing. We have just employed a new sustainability manager, which was a big addition to our business. We’ve built that into our team’s KPIs now. Bonuses and rewards are all based around delivery of the departmental objectives in improving the carbon footprint. We’ve also partnered with a company called Net Zero Now and they are going to be our benchmark company. We want to go to several events this year, and they will benchmark those events for our CO2 levels. Then that gives us an annual comparison and hopefully we can say every year we’re improving it, for example, by X percent. We’re improving at Murrayfield, it starts to give us a story, a bit more confidence, a little bit more evidence to the marketplace that what we’re doing is actually the right thing. And in a sensible way.
We’re also making our head office a bit of a centre of excellence for sustainability. We’re looking at our electric charging, solar panels, becoming paperless, etc. And then operationally, we’re moving more towards digital which is an operational swing anyway in the industry, but certainly for us to remove paper and reprinting of brand signs and bar signs and marquee, all that sort of stuff, for us to go digital, it’s a big tick. Also, because a lot of our work is temporary by nature, we use a lot of generators powered by diesel but we’re looking for a very sustainable alternative source: hydrogen power generators. They’re not as frequently found but they’re definitely in the UK and we need to work out a plan to try and evolve towards that. Or the reverse is to become more fixed as opposed to being temporary everywhere and having temporary power supplies driven by generators, which would be a huge win.
In our cups, we don’t use anything that is single use plastics. All our condiments are not single use, all our sauces etc, our knives and forks can be made of bamboo, anything that’s not single use. And then we’re looking at drinks which is a big thing. A big partner of ours is Coca Cola. We are decanting their drinks, which we have to do in the summer at certain venues. We work closely alongside the brands to make sure we learn from what they’re doing as well.
A hydrogen generator sounds expensive. Is there a big cost involved?
That was my first thought. The European golf tour use it to power their media and their analyst’s wagons and so I had a good chat with those guys. It is obviously a bit more expensive, but you work out how these things get refilled and replenished and they’re lighter than the diesel. So, there’s definitely efficiencies to be had with them.
What brands do you work with?
We deal with a lot of international worldwide brands. In our tech department, we deal with MasterCard and Visa, amongst others. In the foodservice department, Diageo are a big partner of ours. We build, develop and procure Costa products. For all the sporting events, we partner with Red Bull. We’ve done a partnership with Quorn, which is pretty unique because people go to a fast-food outlet and expect everything to be meaty or fishy. We wanted to partner with Quorn, and we started to arrange their burgers, their products and their steaks, which are thriving. Klimato will only highlight the benefits of using that kind of brand moving forward as well.
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