Our approach to sustainability is simple: we’re committed to looking after each other, so that together, we can look after the planet.
Our first goal is to enable the safety, equity and wellbeing of people, here, within the campus community, and beyond.
These key priorities will help us achieve this goal:
Engage our employees
With a strong foundation that ensures the safety of our employees as our priority objective, we pride ourselves on providing a culture of inclusion that empowers our employees to foster positive relationships and deliver service excellence.
Our goal is to hire, develop, retain and engage a workforce that reflects the communities we serve. We believe that diversity—of gender, background, age, race, ethnicity, sexual orientation, perspectives, abilities and more—is critical to our success.
Empower healthy consumers
We provide the tools that enable, educate, engage and encourage our customers to make healthy choices every day. With a broad selection of tasty, simple, scratch recipes made from nutritious, clean ingredients and clear labels, we make it easier for consumers to achieve their health and wellness goals.
Source locally and build community
We’re committed to maintaining the positive impact our operations have on the millions of people living in our Canadian communities. We support local enterprise through our purchasing, employment opportunities, investment and volunteerism. What’s more, we’re proud to be a part of the diverse social and economic framework that keeps our country strong.
Here’s how we plan to reach our second goal of reducing our greenhouse gas emissions:
Source responsibly
Our purchasing decisions can have significant impact on the Earth and our climate. As a result, it’s critical that we keep sourcing sustainably by increasing our support of suppliers whose methods of production strive to achieve concrete and sustainable development with our natural resources and ecosystems.
We focus on animal welfare, wild-caught and farmed seafood produced using sustainable methods, products that promote fair and equitable global trade, and even minimizing climate change by
avoiding products that contribute to deforestation.
We also offer FairTrade products, such as chocolate and coffee, in retail, residence and catering.
Minimize food waste
Our strategy to combat food waste, which begins well before waste is generated, includes menu planning and portion forecasting. For the unavoidable waste that is generated in our residence dining hall, back-of-house operations, we rely on Leanpath, the latest technology to help us track trends and set targets for improvement.
We’ve even adopted the same approach with our partners so that together, we can reduce post-consumer waste by implementing new technologies that help educate consumers and influence positive behaviours.
Reduce packaging
We’ve witnessed first-hand how unnecessary packaging contributes to waste volumes, and we’ve significantly reduced single-use plastics by removing items such as straws and stirrers from our operations. We will continue to eliminate or reduce additional categories of plastics, as well as introduce compostable and recyclable alternatives according to allowable waste streams.
