At Lexington, we recognise our responsibility to lead on sustainability and inspire change among our clients and stakeholders. Every member of our team plays a role in advancing our environmental commitments.
Our award-winning Green Force network consists of 170 employee champions who drive sustainability initiatives across our business. From organising volunteer days to coordinating food redistribution partnerships, Green Force has delivered substantial impacts on both community and site levels, with 12,832 volunteer and social value days contributed since 2023.
Recent activities include:
We actively support the Chef’s Manifesto in our kitchens, with its biggest influence seen in our Mindful Kitchen concept.
This chef-led initiative empowers more than 1,600 chefs worldwide to work towards a sustainable food system. It focuses on bridging the gap between farm and fork, sourcing local ingredients, creating seasonal menus, and educating our customers.
We are also proud to support Chef’s Manifesto’s Beans is How: a campaign to double global bean consumption by 2028. In this way, we focus on recipe innovation to reduce the use of proteins that emit the most carbon, and substitute these with other less carbon-intensive proteins such as beans and legumes
In 2024, we launched a state-of-the-art CSR dashboard to enhance transparency around our sustainability efforts. This internal tool provides customers and clients with real-time insights into key metrics such as carbon footprint, food waste, and plastic reduction, empowering us to track and improve our impact.
Lexington is proud to support Water Unite, a non-profit organisation whose vision is a world where everyone has access to clean, safe water and decent sanitation and lives free from waste pollution. For every bottle or can of water that is sold at our locations, a donation is made to Water Unite. This initiative will directly improve plastic recycling in some of the world’s poorest communities, raising money for long-lasting educational and practical initiatives.
In 2023, our support for the social businesses in Water Unite’s portfolio helped to distribute over 135 million litres of safe drinking water to over 500,000 people, divert 1,175 tonnes of plastic pollution and support over 4,700 jobs in emerging markets.
Pictured: Elior’s Director of CSR Charlotte Wright and Nzambi Matee, founder of Gjenge Makers in Kenya, supported by Water Unite.
We launched a carbon labelling trial across 4,784 meals to assess if highlighting carbon footprints could reduce the environmental impact of meals served in our business. This initiative successfully led to a 17% decrease in average meal emissions compared to our locations without labelling. This encouraged a shift in dining choices, with a 1.5 percentage point increase in customers opting for vegetarian and plant-based dishes over meat options when carbon labels were displayed.
We are confident in our ability to achieve a reduction in the carbon footprint of our menus, whilst still offering a range of delicious, nutritionally balanced meals that achieve high levels of customer satisfaction.
Since its launch in 2018, our award-winning food brand, ‘Trashed’, has transformed surplus ingredients into innovative, delicious dishes that would otherwise go to waste. By continuously developing new recipes and educating customers on zero-waste food tips, we not only tackle food waste but also help to mitigate rising costs.
We are also partnered with national surplus food organisation, Olio, to ensure surplus food ends up in bellies and not bins. In 2024, we avoided 19,407 kg CO2 emissions by sharing surplus food, distributing 10,714 meals, and conserving 3.3 million litres of water.
We are accredited with the Environmental Management System ISO14001, which ensures we monitor our impact on the environment and apply initiatives to reduce any adverse effects.
We work alongside industry bodies such as WRAP and Food Alert who assist us to ensure our systems are safe, robust and workable.
