Since its inception in 2003, Cater For You has been a trailblazer in the evolving landscape of products sold into the core markets of hospitality, food-to-go, local pubs and clubs, and small artisanal food manufacturers, leading the way in sustainability initiatives.
The UK has always been a place where the entrepreneurial flare and spirit have been warmly embraced, and this is no exception in the food and events industry. The UK’s historical legacy of welcoming people from abroad is also seen within our customer base, and some exciting food producers worldwide are buying from us.
For the first ten years of the business, nothing changed! There was standard packaging for curry outlets (aluminium foil packaging), Chinese / Thai outlets (clear plastic containers), and a mix of board and plastic across other sectors, including the bakery industry.
Recognising the growing demand for sustainability, Cater For You has been proactive in adapting to the shift that began around ten years ago. We have seen an increasing awareness of sustainability among artisanal food producers and the Vegan movement, with their customers demanding compostability and recyclability. Major festivals further accelerated this trend, which required food vendors to meet sustainability standards, a challenge we embraced with confidence.
The industry was then rightfully put on an exponential change with the release of Blue Planet and the ‘Turtle with a straw stuck up its nose’. The food packaging industry has responded to a vast swathe of sustainable/compostable/recyclable products and new innovative materials. The first was sugarcane waste ‘bagasse’ packaging, which has great properties such as being resistant to oil and strong but also compostable – though there is often conflicting information on whether this is compostable in-home recycling or industrial composting. There have been many other sustainable materials in the last two years, such as seaweed packaging (as featured in the Earth shot competition) and paper made from grass, bamboo, palm leaf and more.
The industry body, the Foodservice Packaging Association (FPA), works closely with the government to implement legislation to expedite consumer choice towards more sustainable packaging and the complex back-end chains of local council funding for existing recycling. They are incredibly proactive at ensuring no loopholes, the legislation is clear, and there are no unintended consequences. They are also very proactive at following the legislation, and the industry complies as one, e.g. the single-use plastics ban.
As a business, Cater For You supplies to the full range of customers across many sectors, from small start-ups to major events businesses. The nuances and demands are similar but varied across each sector, and business owners have corporate social responsibility; hence, social responsibility is driven from the top. When speaking with clients, it is clear who is pushing us as a business forward to find new products that are as good as they can be for the environment and those that want the cheapest, which, unfortunately, is also usually the least environmentally friendly.
The most recent single-use plastics ban was a great move forward; we as a business disliked the disposable polystyrene as it represented everything environmentally poor about the industry – it was even costly for us to store and ship against its low value! These products have been replaced by a virtually identical product in recyclable expanded Polypropylene. We are dismayed when we see disposable products being remarketed as reusable when they clearly aren’t.
However, even since the ban of October 31, 2023, we have still received regular phone calls asking to supply these products. This means there is a lack of awareness, and the customer has gone elsewhere to source their supply. This is despite us having stocked a huge range of alternatives for all of the banned products.
Regarding the industry's terminology, a brand-new government-backed initiative is the CMA’s Green Claims Code, where ‘greenwashing’ is used to cloud a product's environmental claims. This has been followed by the more recent ASA guidance on the use of terms such as recyclable, compostable, and biodegradable in their ‘green disposable claims’ guidance.
We were the first company in the UK to publish the recycling codes for various plastics on their website, and a couple of years ago, we followed this up with a vast amount of work to clarify further compostability properties. As part of this, we relied on the manufacturer's guidance and specification sheets for accurate information. We expect to change these claims or definitions again, as many of our card products are lined to make them leakproof. Innovations such as Aqueous, PLA PP, or PE linings will come under increasing scrutiny as part of board-based packing products marketed as fully recyclable or compostable for their ‘plastic-free’ properties.