Environmental impact of meal service catering for dependent senior citizens in Danish municipalities

The Use of Life Cycle-Based Approaches in the Food Service Sector to Improve Sustainability: A Systematic Review

“…The second approach focuses on the assessment of the environmental impact of entire meals instead of individual ingredients. Studies adopting this approach tend to use either the functional unit of an average meal [34][35][36][37][38][39][40][41] or a given quantity of prepared product (ready meal) [42][43][44], instead of using a mass based functional unit of ingredients. Regardless of the choice of functional unit, these studies usually compare the environmental impact of different types of meals (e.g., meat-based meals vs. vegetarian meals).…”

“…Regardless of the choice of functional unit, these studies usually compare the environmental impact of different types of meals (e.g., meat-based meals vs. vegetarian meals). A common finding among studies is that vegetarian meals have considerably lower environmental impact than meat-based meals [34,[36][37][38]44,45]. Saarinen et al [37], for example, found that meat-based lunches have two to three times greater climate impact, and four to five times greater eutrophication impact than vegetarian meals.…”

“…Saarinen et al [37], for example, found that meat-based lunches have two to three times greater climate impact, and four to five times greater eutrophication impact than vegetarian meals. Saxe et al [44] found that main meals with beef have 8-11 times higher environmental impact than an average vegetarian meal. However, other studies [34,36] highlighted that even though vegetarian meals tend to have the lowest impact in general, certain types of vegetarian meals (i.e., those rich in animal-based ingredients such as dairy) had an environmental impact as high as average meat-based meals (e.g., meals with chicken, for example, [34]).…”

“…Such choices have especially important implications for the results of LCA of meals. First and foremost, due to the lack of distinction between different types of plant-based meals in LCA studies, vegetarian meals in many cases do not show a considerable difference compared with other menu options such as poultry or pork [38] or fish and seafood [44]. In addition, lumping all types of plant-based meals under the term "vegetarian" can prevent us from finding out which types of meals are truly the most environmentally sustainable.…”

Assessment of an expanded-polypropylene isothermal box to improve logistic sustainability of catering services

“…Each one has well-defined procedures to identify the best practices for serving meals, considering the restrictions in term of time between preparation and consumption and acceptable temperature drops to ensure food safety (Williams et al, 1996). Besides food safety parameters, catering services are transitioning towards a more sustainable way of feeding their target groups (Baldwin et al, 2011;Palacios-Argüello et al, 2018;Saxe et al, 2019). For instance, they purchase energy-efficient kitchen equipment, use tap water, transport food using vehicles with a low environmental impact, and reduce significantly the use of packaging (Balzaretti et al, 2018).…”