Waste Knot, want not
Some of the allmanhall team and their clients recently spent a day with Metcalfe Catering Equipment, Nisbets and Waste Knot at a busy working farm in Worcestershire, discovering the challenges faced by farmers around fruit and vegetable supply, and learning how to best ‘respect the ingredient’.
What does ‘respect the ingredient’ mean?
allmanhall created the initiative in collaboration with Metcalfe Catering Equipment and Nisbets to support the education of our client partners about the nuances of food production and supply. This includes inspiring with delicious ingredients, encouraging the reduction of waste, and working together to create a more sustainable future.
As food procurement experts, managing food supply chains, allmanhall are on a mission to ensure good food shouldn’t cost the earth and know that collaboration and partnerships are the only way to make this happen.
Food waste impacts the supply chain
Around 7% of fruit and vegetables grown in the UK never makes it to a plate – that means more than £1 billion worth of goodness going to waste.
It is common practice for this excess produce to have various fates: ploughed back into the ground, sent to landfill, burnt, sent to anaerobic-digestion or used for animal feed.
This practice is caused by a mismatch between the precise quantities that the market demands, and the variable amounts nature can supply depending on weather and growing conditions. To counterbalance this, farmers must grow a lot more than they actually need. About three million tonnes more!
The situation is exacerbated by the retailer/consumer demand for aesthetically perfect fruit and vegetables.
Jess Latchford created Waste Knot to tackle the root of the issue – getting surplus vegetables out of farmers’ fields and into chefs’ kitchens. Around half of the rescued fruit and vegetables ends up with commercial caterers and restaurants. The other half goes to charities that are working to alleviate food poverty. And this is where farms come in.
The FerryFast farm is run by third-generation farmers who grow fruit and vegetable crops, from large orchards of plum and apple varieties to year-round brassica production, on their 800-acre site in the Vale of Evesham.
Partnering with Waste Knot is helping make sure that tonnes of delicious fresh produce are used, even when labelled as imperfect or deemed surplus to requirement. To date, they have redistributed over five million meals’ worth of fresh produce through FareShare.
Learning about food waste at first hand
Why were allmanhall there? To learn first-hand about the cultivation and redistribution of fresh produce through Waste Knot.
Along with Jamie Clews of Metcalfe, and some of our client partners (from schools, care homes, and wedding venues), we met with Jess from Waste Knot, and Rob and Caitlin from FerryFast, for a tour around the farm, starting with the courgette field.
Growing courgettes is labour-intensive as every courgette must be picked by hand. To grow courgettes successfully, the soil should be kept moderately moist throughout, and more when the plants are in flowering and fruiting stages. The driest spring in 69 years has meant that the farm is already having to irrigate their courgette seedlings, therefore increasing production costs. They use an automatic irrigation system which has to be manually moved every three hours once a section is sufficiently watered.
This is in stark contrast to last spring when excessive rain caused waterlogged fields and delayed planting. April 2024 saw 111.4mm of rainfall, compared to the average of 71.9mm, making it the sixth wettest April of the last 189 years.
The farm workers pick courgettes every other day during the height of the season. Courgettes grow rapidly and produce bulky fruits with high water content. If a courgette is missed by the pickers, it can quickly grow to the size of a marrow and is therefore far too big for the standard supply chain – but it is still delicious!
Each time a courgette goes to waste, the time and energy the growers put in are also wasted. For every rescued tonne of courgettes, which saves 583kg of C02e and 25,390 litres of water!
Passing fields under herbal ley (sown pastures made up of a mix of grasses, herbs and legumes to deliver soil fertility, biology and structure, boost livestock health, and encourage biodiversity) we moved on to the cauliflower field.
Cauliflowers and leeks were on the menu
Class 1-graded cauliflowers must be snow-white, like the one Caitlin is holding, but cauliflowers can get sunburnt, and the recent spell of very hot weather means that some of the heads have turned yellow, so they would be rejected even though they are still perfectly edible. With Waste Knot’s help, every cauliflower will be eaten.
Our next stop was the leek field. Supermarkets require leeks to be at least 50% white, and any leeks with less than this will be rejected. However, the green part of the vegetable is edible and delicious, so all the leeks will be picked and distributed through Waste Knot. In the meantime, allmanhall’s guests were given the opportunity to pick their own!
We ended our day in the apple orchards, full of both eating and cider apple trees. Local beekeepers have put their hives in the orchards so that vital pollinators have easy access to the apple trees. All our clients left for home with a much deeper understanding of the food supply chain, and the work that Waste Knot is doing, alongside British farmers, to put every crop to good use as a respected ingredient.
Opening our eyes to the challenges facing farmers
As Paul Wallis, allmanhall’s Client Relationship Manager said, “The day opened our eyes to the knife edge that our farmers work on. Too wet and they lose crops, too dry and they lose crops, reduced demand and they waste crops… I have a renewed appreciation for what they are up against every day of their lives!”
In collaboration with Metcalfe Catering Equipment and Nisbets, allmanhall is working tirelessly to educate and inspire our clients to reduce waste and to create a responsible and sustainable food system – because good food shouldn’t cost the Earth!