We'd never have guessed it….

We recently launched our new platform Zedible to help food and hospitality organisations to understand and then manage their CO2 originating from food & drink purchasing. We provide the data layer to help quantify what's going on and which direction to spend more time to deep dive. 

Griff and I were previously founders of ethically minded quick service restaurant chain Friska that was 2009-2021. We are now operators of a small Cafe chain called Double Puc Cafe. Still being operators means we have used our own business as a case study.

Using Zedible to capture the data around our own CO2 reduction journey and the results are very very surprising! We have data going back to October 2021 and each month we can see how revenues, CO2 in kg and CO2 intensity vary month to month. 

If you’d asked us before the platform was live what would have been our top three emitters by product we would have said chicken, bacon and sausages in that order. The result however show we were completely wrong! At Double Puc the Carbon is not even on the plate, for us its actually in the cup!

Our top three are espresso coffee, full fat milk and filter coffee! The first meat that hits our top 100 is ham in at number 6 and then sausages at number 8. This is even more surprising when we look at our sales mix and see that we are a food led operation to the tune of 20% coffee 80% food by sales. 

From this we are looking to change our default milk option from full fat milk to semi skimmed (but we buy non-homogenised milk so it still steams really well). Given semi skimmed milk has over 20% less CO2 per kg than whole milk we are expecting to see that we can make a dent in our 2nd largest CO2 emitter!

Making a change which protects the planet, margins and the customer is a pretty great feeling and we can’t wait to report this progress back in a couple of months….watch this space.