As cost pressures continue to mount across hospitality, sustainability can often fall into the “nice to have” category – yet long-term business resilience depends on it. The Caterer’s Sustainability Summit 2025 aims to tackle the key question: how can leaders champion meaningful environmental change when every penny counts?
In this webinar, hospitality leaders explored how to embed sustainable practices into business strategy while dealing with rising operational costs, recruitment pressures and shifting guest expectations.
Whether you're just beginning your sustainability journey or looking to take your strategy to the next level, the Sustainability Summit gives you the opportunity to gain actionable insights from leaders across the industry.
At the summit, delegates learned:
- How to prioritise initiatives when money and time are limited
- How to gain buy-in from owners and senior teams
- The best strategies to get your teams excited about sustainability goals
- Balancing guest experience with environmental impact
- Proven approaches to measuring R OI while building a culture of change
James Stagg, editor, The Caterer
What’s important to your business, and what do you want to be known for?
These are the first questions sustainability strategist Dr Kirstie McIntyre asks when guiding businesses on their ESG journey. In this practical and thought-provoking session, she’ll explore how hospitality leaders and board members can turn good intentions into clear strategies, defined goals, and credible action - all supported by a realistic understanding of time, budget, and people resources.
Sustainability is progressively becoming a business-critical priority as investors increasingly assess risk through an ESG lens - and as employees, clients and customers demand meaningful progress - the industry, and its leaders, must define what truly matters and take steps to embed it at the heart of the business.
Drawing on over 30 years of experience in implementing sustainability programs and advising leadership teams, McIntyre will discuss how to:
- Identify material ESG issues that matter to your brand and stakeholders
- Understand what steps you need to take to start your sustainability journey
- Align sustainability with commercial goals, even when time and resources are limited
- Understand stakeholder expectations and reduce risk exposure
This session is designed for business leaders who want to put sustainability at the heart of business strategy and success.
How do you inspire a workforce of thousands to embrace trailblazing sustainability initiatives and embed best practice into everything they do?
Levy, the sports and leisure division of Compass Group, shares how it has created a culture of accountability, education and empowerment for everyone from senior leaders to casual staff so it can drive real change at scale for people and planet.
By keeping things simple, practical and filled with positive energy, Levy has empowered teams to make meaningful changes, creating a culture where sustainability is not only understood, but embraced at every level.
From culinary masterclasses to hands-on days on its co-sponsored regenerative Biohub; with amped up internal communications, dedicated sustainability workshops and the power of data harnessed to hold teams accountable, Levy has made sustainability part of every team member’s muscle memory.
The result? Reluctance turns to motivation, and accountability into action. With leadership setting the vision, and teams driving it forward on the ground, sustainability sits at the core of the business, not just as a box to be ticked.
How do hospitality leaders drive meaningful sustainability action when facing relentless cost, staffing, and operational pressures?
This cross-sector panel brings together business leaders from hotels, restaurants, pubs, bars, and foodservice to explore how sustainability can remain a strategic priority – even when resources are tight. From gaining buy-in at board level and prioritising practical initiatives, to engaging employees and avoiding greenwash, our panellists will share the real-world challenges they’ve faced and the solutions that are working.
Moderator
Victoria Miller, reporter, The Caterer
Sponsor
Compass Group UK & Ireland is the UK’s largest food and support services provider: the people behind the food, hospitality and services that brighten your day, make you smile and put a spring in your step. Operating in some 5,000 + locations across the UK & Ireland, we provide expert catering, cleaning, and facilities management services to a range of clients and sectors across the country. In the UK and Ireland we’re tens of thousands of talented people providing tasty, well-cooked food and support services to improve the health and wellbeing of workers, school children, hospital patients, military and visitors to the nation’s major sports and cultural events.