Lexington’s TRASHED brand, which focuses on creating delicious dishes, utilising sustainable breeds and cuts of underused meats and vegetables that generally end up being thrown away, was launch at Lexington’s annual chef competition, Lex Chef, in November 2018. It then started to be rolled out across client sites in February 2019 to raise awareness around food waste.
Julia Edmonds, Managing Director at Lexington, said, “Winning this award is fantastic – it really demonstrates the ground-breaking steps the Lexington team is taking in our bid to reduce food waste. It also highlights our commitment to work in partnership with stakeholders to achieve more sustainable practices and our commitment to help clients, customers and the industry more widely to make simple changes to reduce our impact on the environment.”
Some 1.9 million tons of food is wasted by the food industry every year in the UK and approximately one third of food produced worldwide is wasted and sent to landfill. It is estimated that if one-quarter of food wastage globally could be saved, it would be enough to feed 870 million people.
Rob Kirby, Chef Director at Lexington Catering said, “As caterers we have a responsibility to help beat food waste. We can help deal with food waste by educating chefs and customers about what it is we can eat and by making the food super-tasty, essentially rescuing food that would go to waste and to landfill.”
