Charity Run Scheme

Type of practice Reuse for food

Name of practice Charity Run Scheme

Name of main actor Pret A Manger, London

Type of actor(s) Food services

Location United Kingdom

Stage of implementation End-of-life

Year of implementation 1990

What was/is being done? Pret A Manger is a fast food chain with sandwiches and salads that are made in-house throughout each day using natural, preservative-free ingredients. Pret operates 150 shops, with nearly 4,000 employees, and turns over close to 180 million euros each year. At the end of each day, Pret restaurants offer their unsold food to dozens of homeless shelters in ensuring that their fresh natural food goes where it is needed and not into the bin. Each of the 40 Pret A Manger stores participating in this delivery scheme have a guaranteed pickup every evening between 3pm and 8pm. The food is then delivered to 16 homeless charities in central and east London. One of Pret’s goals is to avoid using landfills - Pret now has back-of-house recycling and is investigating options for composting food waste generated in its kitchens. Also, they ensure all their packaging is recyclable, and in the 1990s, they became the first retailer to replace the usual plastic sandwich containers with cardboard sandwich boxes. These are made with card board from sustainably managed forests with a waterbased coating. This, combined with the cornstarch window, means that the box is 100% recyclable, biodegradable and compostable.

Outcomes and impacts The Pret Charity Run now operates a fleet of electric vans that deliver over 12,000 fresh meals to numerous shelters for the homeless in London each week. Future targets are to reduce this as much as possible, from 3.5% to 3.3% of total food. The program is helping Pret A Manger divert between 200 – 250 tonnes of wasted food from landfills annually. Recent packaging developments include: (1) reducing the amount of material used in baguette bags and bloomer wraps, saving 8.27 tonnes of packaging material each year; (2) cutting the thickness of salad bowl plastic from 500 to 450 microns and saving 7 tonnes of plastic each year; (3) in 2007, they reduced the number of plastic bags used by 24% simply by asking customers if they actually wanted one.