Ordering delicious food for the workplace is a smart business move. It energizes employees, boosts their productivity, and makes them feel appreciated. But as smart as workplace meals are, many food orderers find themselves craving more sustainable choices.
Sustainable catering means choosing food options that are kinder to the environment, and to local communities. As an eco-conscious food orderer, there’s a lot you can do to reduce your company’s environmental impact while getting your teams the healthy, delicious meals they deserve.
With some help from a reliable partner like ezCater, you can make more sustainable catering choices with ease.
How to order more sustainable catering with ezCater
ezCater has several features that promote more sustainable catering and help you make choices that are less harmful to the environment. Here’s how you can use them.
Reduce vehicle emissions
Ordering lunch from a nearby establishment is one of the easiest ways to cut emissions. When your food travels just a mile or two to reach you, the delivery vehicle burns less fuel and emits fewer greenhouse gasses into the atmosphere.
Our distance filter lets you see eateries within a specific distance from your workplace. For example, you can set it to two miles or less to find the closest restaurants and caterers.
Using the filter is a small action that can make a big difference. Your company could save nearly one pound of carbon dioxide for every mile your food doesn’t travel.
Reduce food waste
As anyone who’s ordered food for a company-wide meeting or team event knows, workplace catering sometimes means extra food. Getting just the right amount of food for everyone can be tricky, no matter the crowd size.
Our headcount feature can help you curb food waste and combat over-ordering in the first place. After you enter how many people you’re feeding and spend some time browsing local menus, you’ll see a recommended serving size for each dish, which means you can spend less time guesstimating how much food to order. Then, when you’re ready to checkout, we’ll compare your crowd size to what’s in your cart. If you have too much food, you can easily remove servings to avoid over-ordering.
Relish by ezCater is another food waste-fighting tool. It’s a recurring meal program that allows employees to select exactly what they plan to eat on the days they plan to be on-site. Because everyone gets individually packaged meals they love, you’re less likely to end up with leftovers.
Reduce single-use plastics
With takeout, delivery, and catering, it’s hard to avoid plastic of all kinds, but there are steps you can take to reduce the amount you use. At ezCater, Relish customers can opt-out when it comes to utensils, rather than automatically including them in orders.
You can also use regular metal silverware for workplace meals, which reduces greenhouse gas emissions, water usage, and air pollution.
Reduce overall emissions
Going meatless even one day a week creates benefits for the planet. After all, plant-based diets have the lowest carbon footprint. And planning a plant-forward menu for your work lunches doesn’t have to be complicated.
You can draw inspiration from the Meatless Mondays movement, or simply search for plant-based meals available near you. Our vegan and vegetarian filters can show you all the local restaurants and caterers offering meatless dishes.
Vegetarian cuisine is anything but basic. And recent studies have shown that employees often don’t notice when meat options are gradually replaced with delicious plant-based meals. Start with simple swaps to ease your workplace into a plant-based meals — and sprinkle the meatless days into your typical catering schedule. For example, you could order black bean tacos for Taco Tuesday or vegetarian pizzas loaded with seasonal produce for your next company-wide meeting.
Team up with a trusted, reliable food service
Ordering food responsibly isn’t so hard when you have the right tools. With a reliable food service like ezCater, you can make eco-friendly choices while fueling your employees for success. Ready to lower emissions, cut food waste, and limit single-use plastics? Put our filters and features to the test by placing a catering order today.
