Environmental responsibility
For us, environmental responsibility means maximizing the positive impacts we have on the environment. In our every-day activities this shows as for example seasonal menu planning, favoring domestic ingredients and minimizing our electricity and water usage.
Determined development work
Our environment work has a strong base – our first environment policy traces back to as early as 1997. Till this day, we still form annual environmental policies, with the background idea of constantly wanting to develop in carrying environmental responsibility.
Our development work is proven to be high-quality. We have been given the international ISO 14 001 certificate, which proves that we have an environmental policy which we constantly develop. The certificate means that we recognize the negative environmental impacts and constantly try to improve the consideration of environmental issues in every operating area of the company. The certificate is audited annually.
Our development work aims to make environment-friendly choices easy for our customers, among other things. We for example provide the possibility to eat a vegetarian meal with a balanced nutritional value every day. We also provide the option to compensate part of the carbon footprint of the goods we sell. Our customers can donate at least 5 cents to our Reforest-collaboration while paying for their goods. For every donation, Juvenes also donates 5 cents, and the funds are used for Reforest’s reforestation work. The collaboration has proved to be valuable – in 2022 we planted 29 trees, which equals to saving 14 tons of carbon dioxide emissions.
We aim to keep making progress in minimizing the negative impacts we have on our environment. In the restaurant field, these impacts are closely related to for example food waste management and ingredient choices and purchases.
Food waste management
17 % of all of Finland’s food waste comes from hospitality services. (Luonnonvara- ja biotalouden tutkimus 49/2021). For us, minimizing food waste begins in our product development. We also try to optimize the amount of food we serve in restaurants, and we have food waste tracking weeks twice a year, of which the results are shown in each restaurant. We succeeded in minimizing waste in 2022 – we produced 12 % less waste per customer, compared to 2021.
Another efficient food waste management tool is our Save a lunch -concept. Customers can buy leftover lunch from all our restaurants, right after lunchtime ends. We also sell leftover food via the app ResQ. In 2022 we saved over 17 300 lunches, which equals to saving 43,3 tons of carbon dioxide emissions!
Ingredients
Most of the environment impacts related to food come from primary production. Agriculture and food production have a strong impact on for example the diversity of nature and deforestation. Ingredients matter, and choosing the right ones is very important to us.
As a Finnish company, it feels natural to choose domestic ingredients, whenever possible. This is also an impactful way to minimize negative environment impacts. As of right now, the domestic rate of all our ingredients is 80 %. Additionally, 100 % of the meat products we use in our non-student restaurants are domestic.
We have set guidelines for our procurements, such as:
- We only use domestically produced floor hen’s eggs
- We get our dairy and dairy products from Valio
- The meat products we use are always traceable, and 100 % domestic in non-student restaurants
- The fish products we use are either marked green by WWF, or MSC or ASC certificated
- In our café products, such as coffee, tea, bananas, and chocolate are Fairtrade certified.
- The palm oil and soy we use is certified in all our products We also only use GMO-free products
