Noah’s Ark Zoo Farm

1. Tell us a bit about Noah’s Ark, and your role at the farm:

We used to have an external catering company, and I was bought on to bring catering back in-house. To start with, a lot of the sustainable options weren’t there. Polystyrene coffee cups were prevalent, and we had the cheapest food offerings. We didn’t know where it was sourced from and it was bad quality, which doesn’t reflect us as a business.

Homemade cakes and meals are common here now, with sustainably sourced packaging for the ready meals too. It's local meat; obviously, the farm that we're within supplies us with the meats for those products. We now have a food offering that aligns with who we are.

2. Previously, what did you do with your food waste, and what were the sorts of challenges you experienced with your previous food waste collections?

We used one of the big companies for food waste collection, and with that came a host of issues including price, erratic collection days and a service which felt impersonal. We wanted a food waste collection provider which matched our ethos of promoting caring, wellbeing and sustainable choices.

3. Comparably, what are the key benefits you’ve experienced with GENeco since you started to use our service?

You offer regular, friendly driver service, and a sustainable process by using vehicles that run on gas from the food waste we produce. As well as that, it comes across as more of a local business than a ‘multinational’ one, that is not necessarily interested in our parts to what we do here.

As we're a charity, you offer us a free service, which is like a donation from you to us. It's just immensely helpful for somebody to support you.

The links and the introductions to your partners are huge, we've had compost and enrichment materials donated to us through the people we’ve been introduced to. It's fantastic to have that to go on our horticulture project, to then go around in one big circle to produce flowers and pumpkins.

Our relationship feels like a community partnership.

4. As a business, would you mind going into more detail about some of your sustainability goals?

Sustainability is a bigger-picture goal for us, particularly the educational aspect. We had a total of 40,000 school children visit this summer and we teach them how to minimise waste, grow their own food, and cook it too. Sometimes, the adults and the parents are the ones who need the most education! We also educate visitors about rainwater harvesting, and how to create animal habitats around the zoo for the animals.