QEII Centre Leads the Way in Reducing Food Waste

The QEII Centre has celebrated over 30 years at the heart of London’s event industry. It is the largest dedicated conference, events and exhibition space in central London. Located in Westminster, the venue offers world-class facilities for high profile conferences, conventions, exhibitions, award dinners and corporate events with a capacity of up to 2,500.

As part of a company-wide initiative to prevent food waste supported by the QEII, Levy UK is leading the way and helping to ‘spread the word’ with innovative ideas to prevent and stop food waste in the kitchen. With our chefs hosting over 400 national and international events a year, these small changes are having a huge impact.

Underpinning the venue’s success at reducing food waste is forward-thinking menu planning. The menu onsite is carefully constructed each week to account for and use up any leftover or damaged ingredients across various dishes on the menu that week, for example if biscuits are made for hospitality and they break or crack during cooking, they will then be used to form the base of a dessert the following day.

All our events are booked in advance, allowing us to be very clever about our menu planning and ensure that we cater for any meetings and smaller events on the same day using the same menu. This allows our kitchen to batch cook and only order in exactly what is required.

Additionally, the staff canteen menu is flexible, allowing us to design it around our events e.g. using leftover vegetables to make soup and bones for stock. We recently catered a dinner for 500 people where we were serving fish for main, and instead of ordering 500 individual fillets, we ordered the whole fish and utilised the off cuts to make fish pie the next day in the staff canteen.

Sustainability is crucial to our operational agenda at the QEII. We have a smooth-running process that allows us to be flexible, our chefs to be innovative with their cooking and cater to the needs of all our clients. It’s great to see the difference we are making onsite and we want to continue to lead the way and show that small changes can make a big difference over time.

#QEIICares #LevyCares #StopFoodWaste #SpreadtheWord

Ends