Sustainability at Hawksmoor

Ever since we first started Hawksmoor we wanted to do things the right way.  As our ambitions have grown, we’ve focused on building a restaurant company with real integrity, to show that you can be successful while prioritising the things you care about most.  For us, that has always included championing regenerative agriculture and proper management of pastureland that offsets and removes carbon from the atmosphere, sustainable fishing practices and local, seasonal sourcing.

Hawksmoor has just been awarded a maximum 3* rating from the Sustainable Restaurant Association for the 12th consecutive year – which we’re proud to say makes us one of the most sustainable restaurant groups in the country.

As COP26 kicks off in Glasgow, we want to let you know about sustainability at Hawksmoor, and our plans to go even further.

Over the years we perhaps haven’t talked about the work we do behind the scenes, which ranges from bones for dogs or recipe ideas for staff taking leftovers home, to 100% of our food waste being sent to anaerobic digestion where it’s turned into bio gas, or the oil in our chip fryers being used to power vehicles. However, it now feels like these things need to be discussed more.

This year we switched the entire company over to green energy, reducing our footprint by the equivalent of taking 103 cars off the road, planting 8000 trees or switching 18000 lightbulbs to LED.

We’re really proud to say that we’re going even further by minimising and offsetting our carbon footprint to become carbon neutral in 2022, and we have signed up to the United Nation’s “Race to Zero”, with a goal to become a ‘net zero company’ (an even higher bar than carbon neutral) by 2030.

This year we’ve put 100 of our managers through carbon literacy training and we’re setting up green teams in the restaurants so all staff can get even more involved in cutting emissions, waste and food waste and constantly making improvements – big and small – across the company and the supply chain.

As we’ve said on our website for years, we do this kind of thing “not because it’s trendy and cool or because we’re natural tree-huggers or hippy peaceniks. We do it because we want to – it’s the kind of company we want to be and the kind of restaurants we want to run. We want a business we can be proud of – whether that’s making sure the food we serve is as good as possible, that the animals lived a decent life, or that everyone who works with us enjoys what they do.”

We hope that from time to time you feel as proud to be part of it as we do.