Compass Group UK & Ireland scores a hat trick of nutrition wins

Compass Group UK & Ireland, the UK’s largest food and support services company won three awards across its business at Footprint Media's Health & Vitality Honours 2019. Held at London's St James's Square, leaders of the health agenda in the ‘Out of Home’ sector gathered for the prestigious event, which has become a platform for businesses to showcase best practice and insight into health and nutrition within the foodservice industry and supply chain.

Compass Group’s nutrition team won the Health & Vitality Communication and Engagement honours for their website and nutrition platform, Nourished Life, which promotes health and wellbeing. The website and related social media channels focus on a number of key areas including food and nutrition, lifestyle, sleep and recipes, as well as allowing visitors to the site to contact one of our nutritionists with a question. Collectively, the Nourished Life site and social media pages have received over 100,000 views.

Chartwells, Compass’ education business, won Honours in Education in partnership with East Sussex County Council for their ‘Nudge Nudge’ initiative trialled across 15 schools. The scheme looked at whether a set of nudging techniques could successfully shift a school population’s food choice towards healthier options. A combination of education and clearly labelling meals with “Follow you heart” to highlight their health benefits, saw a marked increase in both healthier choices being made as well understanding the benefits of healthier eating and making more informed food choices.  

Lastly, ESS Defence, Compass’ defence business, received Public Sector Health & Vitality Honours for all the fantastic work their team have done, and continue to do, to aid compliance and drive healthier meal uptake across military sites in the UK. ESS’s 2020 Health and Wellbeing Strategy which aims to feed change and fight obesity, underpins everything they do. In 2018, ESS trebled in size and now cater for all military units in Wales, the West Midlands and the East and South West of England. This growth resulted in gaining a significant number of new employees. It was paramount that all new employees were trained on ESS’s systems, processes and wellbeing strategy to ensure contract compliance but also that they appreciated, understood and knew how to implement as well as engage, communicate, promote and support military personnel in all the services available to them to support a balanced and healthy lifestyle.

Since March 2018, the ESS Nutrition team have gained Association for Nutrition Level 1 in catering for their training and delivered over 100 Regulatory, Health and Wellbeing training sessions to over 1,000 new employees, with training ongoing.

Mick Hickman, Foodservice Director, Compass Group UK & Ireland commented “I am really proud of what our nutritionists have achieved across our business. Health and wellbeing is central to what we do and we take our responsibility as a food service provider very seriously. We prepare, cook and serve more than one million meals every day and, at every meal occasion, we make sure there is a healthy choice designed around what our customers tell us they like. In addition to serving nutritionally balanced meals, we are helping to educate our front-line teams and our consumers about a healthy diet and lifestyle. Huge congratulations to our teams for these great results.”