Compass Partners With FirstCarbon Solutions

FirstCarbon Solutions and Compass Group have announced the launch of the software tool being used to support Compass's Carbon FOODprint toolkit. The web-based tool is designed to help Compass food operations staff lower their environmental impact and operational costs. Early Carbon FOODprint adopters include notable companies such as SAP and colleges like Auburn University and Green Mountain College.

Carbon FOODprint allows chefs and managers to create customized strategies to reduce their operations' carbon footprints by decreasing waste disposal and energy and water use. Foodservice managers can make up to 185 strategic choices in four key areas, including menu engineering, kitchen services, site equipment and facilities. Developed by FirstCarbon Solutions and hosted as part of its Sustainability Workbench platform, the web-based software application is an integral part of the Carbon FOODprint toolkit. It allows cafes to benchmark and measure the improvements made throughout the cafe, which can be shared with clients for annual reports, sustainability indexes, and disclosure to public programs such as the Carbon Disclosure Project (CDP).

To develop the strategic planning portion of the Carbon FOODprint toolkit, Compass partnered with key players such as the Green Restaurant Association, the Environmental Defense Fund and the Food Service Technology Center (supported by Pacific Gas & Electric). In "Phase 2" of this project, Compass teamed with FirstCarbon Solutions to enhance the toolkit with sustainability metrics in a robust and user-friendly software platform, with cutting-edge dashboard applications for food service industry clients.

Marc Zammit, Vice President of Sustainability Initiatives at Compass Group, said the web-based tool was created in response to his clients' growing interest in having a strategic planning tool to measure, manage, and lower their operation costs and food service carbon footprint.

"With Carbon FOODprint, we now have an opportunity to provide our clients with cost effective solutions to lower the environmental impact of their food services," Zammit says.  "Commercial food service is a resource intense operation, and our onsite teams will use this scalable toolkit to make their operation more sustainable by minimizing carbon impact, while at the same time implementing best practices that lower operational costs in the areas of menuing, energy, water and waste. Supported by FirstCarbon Solutions software, managers will now have the information they need to make the best choices for their business, their clients and the environment."

As part of the design and collaboration with Compass Group, FirstCarbon Solutions collected thousands of pieces of data on the production, packaging, and transport of individually purchased food items, serving materials, and cleaning chemicals required to manage a foodservice operation "from cradle to customer." The Toolkit couples this information with site-specific operational data from individual cafes to provide up-to-date dashboards on the carbon, energy, water, and wastes associated with all aspect of a food service operation (facilities, kitchen operations, kitchen services, and menu engineering).

Carbon FOODprint toolkit is currently generally available to all 9,900 Compass Group cafes in the United States.