Why Ollie Penn takes food waste reduction personally
Food waste is one of the greatest contributors to climate change and biggest scandals of our time. As a vital lever of our net zero 2040 journey, Sodexo has pledged to halve food waste by 2025 – with so many of our clients, partners and colleagues playing an active role. In this series, we introduce you to some of the people across our business who have an Appetite for Action on fighting food waste.
Ollie Penn is Sodexo’s Deputy Operations Manager at leading private school, Wellington College.Serving 3,500 meals a day to tight timescales poses particular challenges for food waste reduction, but with staff and students fully on board there’s no shortage of ideas. Ollie explains what’s been achieved, what’s coming next, and why he’s optimistic about his own personal food waste targets.
Learning to loathe food waste
I hate food waste. Probably because I’ve been looking at it in one form or another for about 10 years. I first came to Wellington College for a part-time job when I was studying catering and hospitality. I started in the plate wash area, and the volume of food that the students left behind just blew me away. In the years that followed, including a Sodexo management training programme where I learnt the whole catering process from loading bay to plate, I’ve seen how far we’ve come and can see the opportunities ahead too.
We have a team of 170 here, responsible for feeding 1,200 pupils and hundreds of staff and visitors through busy days of learning, teaching and physical activity. That’s our priority. We know that our breakfast service, which is a nutritious hot meal for 800 boarders completed in just 45 minutes, won’t ever be zero waste. We can’t risk running out and having people go hungry and students don’t have the time to wait for us to rustle something up on demand. The point is to bring food waste down to the lowest level we can across breakfast, lunch and supper.