Steps to Sustainability: Wednesday Lunches
At Supreme Creations we try to take as many steps as we can towards being a successfully sustainable business. This is across our entire supply chain, production line and various offices, and ranges from things like shipping via sea freight to keeping our office filled with greenery. One step which we have taken in our London office as part of our sustainability initiatives is a shared lunch each Wednesday.
Every Wednesday at around 1pm, our London team is greeted with the beautiful smells of delicious hot food wafting up the stairs. We celebrate the Indian culture behind the business, and are usually treated to a warming curry, or sometimes in the summer opt for a fresh Lebanese spread. This food is all made locally, and therefore we are supporting a local business as a loyal, weekly customer. It is something which I know for a fact every team member looks forward to each week, myself included. It is not just an average platter of sandwiches like most dreary corporate lunches – it is vibrant, exciting and delicious. It changes weekly, ranging from spicy chickpeas in a warming, hot sauce, to fresh naan still warm when it arrives, to thick creamy hummus which we fight over to get the last scrapes of the delicious chickpea goodness.
This weekly occurrence isn’t just about the food itself – it is so about to much more than that. Firstly, the lunch brings the team together. We spend our days in the office focusing on our own tasks and projects, and in the day to day hubbub of working life we rarely get an opportunity to sit together and bond as a team. Yet the lunch on a Wednesday allows us to chat over mounds of steaming hot food, and take some time out of our day to focus on each other, and how we are all doing.
The meal also helps with our sustainability efforts. Having one shared meal across everyone in the office means we minimise wastage – 20-30+ people all bringing individually packaged lunches creates a lot of waste, and this is one way in which we can reduce that. Our food comes in tin toil containers, no single-use plastic in sight, and we make sure to recycle any packaging once we are done. It also minimises food waste as we will eat every last scrap – it’s just too delicious to resist. Also, as it is a local business that supplies us, we help to reduce food miles, meaning that it is better for the environment.
A shared lunch once a week is not something that takes a lot of effort to implement, but is something which makes a big difference to both our team and our environment. It is an example of how small adaptions, changes and strategies can have a large and lasting effect on our environment. Everyone benefits – the local business is supported by us on a regular basis, our team are able to bond over delicious food, and we are able to reduce food miles and waste, meaning that we are able to do our bit for the environment.
There are so many small steps to sustainability that we have taken, and you can to. Our Instagram page @bagsofethics features a plethora of tips on how to stay sustainable, and make adaptions no matter who you are or what you do. We also want to share more of our business tips with others to help share how we stay happy, healthy and environmentally conscious as a workplace – so come back for more tips and tricks very soon. And if you have any ideas of your own that you would like to share with us, please feel free to share them with us.
Daisy from the Supreme Creations team