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Sustainability

Sustainability is at the heart of our ethos. Find out the latest sustainability news, developments and information on our blog. We cover concepts like food waste, plastic-free, seasonality and much more.

 

Choose ethical chocolate this Christmas!

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At Christmas time, when we’re all thinking about chocolate, we wanted to mention that we’re full of beans about ethical chocolate!

Chocolate, which most of us take for granted, often has a slightly bitter aftertaste, not because it’s 85% cocoa but because the industry is a complex global supply chain which often results in cocoa farmers, particularly children, losing out. Chocolate is a luxury and we should be able to pay fairly for such a delicious treat.

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Classes Supplier Spotlight Sustainability We Love

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Humans of Hospitality meets Cookery School

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Humans of Hospitality is a podcast by people for people. It was founded by Mark Cribb, a wonderful hotelier and restaurateur who believes passionately in the true meaning of hospitality, defined as the friendly and generous reception and entertainment of guests, visitors, or strangers. Not, as Mark says, ‘a balance sheet and a board of directors in a venture capitalist firm in the city.’

With common ground in our approach to people and local communities –

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Sustainability We Love

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Celebrating our suppliers: Hasbean

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coffee in coffee machine

We choose all our suppliers very carefully, opting to work with companies that share the same ethos that we do. When it comes to coffee, we work with Hasbean, a sustainable coffee roaster and supplier based in Stafford, in England’s north.

Stephen Leighton established Hasbean in 1999 and chooses to work directly with over 30 coffee producers around the world, in places such as Costa Rica, Ethiopia,

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Supplier Spotlight Sustainability

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Zero Waste Week: Tips to take forward

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With Zero Waste Week coming to a close, we’re looking beyond this week to see how we can continue to reduce our waste in our everyday lives. While at Cookery School, our kitchens are plastic-free and our food waste is already limited, we’ve taken the time to look into our personal lives, looking for opportunities where we could cut down even further. We know from experience in our kitchens that it’s nigh-impossible to be zero-waste overnight,

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Sustainability

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Why eat organic?

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Cookery School’s founder, Rosalind, started buying organic ingredients more than thirty years ago because they were free of chemicals like steroids and antibiotics.  They clearly were better for everyone, but were harder to find and had to be sought out.  Now we take it for granted that we can buy most items in organic form.

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Ingredients Sustainability

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Introducing our sustainable team building package!

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As London’s most sustainable cooking school, it goes without saying that all our private and team-building events are run with sustainable practices in mind. However, we’re now taking this one step further, with our sustainable event packages!

These new packages will see visitors create delicious dishes that minimise waste and use less meat, all while learning about sustainability concepts such as carbon footprints, sourcing ingredients and seasonality.

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Corporate Sustainability

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Plastic-Free July: Easy swaps in your kitchen

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Plastic Free July is a fantastic initiative that aims to reduce plastic pollution, but can seem overwhelming on first glance! After all, plastic hides in many products, making swapping them out harder than first thought.

Luckily, there are many easy swaps to make in the kitchen. We have been running a single-use-plastic-free kitchen for over 12 years, so have found many solutions along our journey.

Lose the packaging

The UK suffers from excessive plastic packaging so reducing your consumption is an important first step.

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How To Sustainability

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Ros Rants: The ethics of chocolate

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I am an utter chocoholic and love the stuff but I always have one huge proviso – it has to be 100% slave free. The chocolate that I devour and that we use at Cookery School is always ethical.

In our chocolate making class, taught by the wonderful Jon Hogan from Rococo, we start the day with a tasting of a range of different ethical chocolates. Our students are always shocked to learn that the chocolates that they eat all the time aren’t free of controversy and ought to be given an enormously wide berth.  

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Ingredients Ros Rants Sustainability

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The importance of sourcing sustainable fish

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Fishing continues to be one of the biggest issues facing the food industry. With over-fishing and dredging jeopardising fish stocks and sea bed ecology, it is more important than ever that we investigate where our fish is coming from and ensure the methods used are as sustainable as possible.

What does sustainable fish mean?

Sustainable fish is caught in ways that allow the long-term future and viability of species,

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Ingredients Sustainability

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