Sustainable Service On The Menu: How LNER Is Driving Down Food Waste

From a freshly cooked English Breakfast to a mezze style houmous and rainbow veg grain bowl, LNER takes great pride in the quality and variety of the food it offers onboard its trains.

With an average of 23 million people travelling across 50,000 LNER services each year, predicting what customers would like to eat could be seen as an impossible task. A dedicated team of catering specialists, however, works tirelessly to make sure a delicious range of locally sourced, mouthwatering hot and cold food is available every day.

Thanks to an industry unique system designed by the team, live order information is collected from the trains as items are requested onboard. Data is then combined with each train's historical orders and waste information, plus expected customer numbers, enabling the team to predict what food will be needed. With more than 2.2 million individual food and catering items being served onboard each week, it’s a huge task.

Mark Stevenson, Customer Experience Proposition Manager for LNER said: “Like any household will know, deciding on a weekly menu is challenging enough. But put the dining room on a train and factor in numerous guests eating at different times of day, seasonality, journey length and unscheduled events that change customer numbers, and things can get complicated.”

“We work incredibly hard to provide a wide range of food available for our customers and thanks to the expertise of the team, we’re reducing waste year on year. Currently only 1.5 per cent of the millions of items consumed onboard each year are returned as waste, and even then, we work hard to find a use for them.”

It’s not just order forecasting that helps LNER keep its waste to a minimum. The development and selection of menu items also play a part.

Sara Jenson, Hospitality Manager for LNER said: “Our teams lead the end-to-end development of our dishes and select only quality ingredients from our suppliers who are located up and down our route. We monitor food trends and pride ourselves that our dishes are reflective of customers' current tastes.

“That’s why it’s important that we regularly test our food, to make sure it travels well so we know we can serve great tasting food onboard.”

While every step is taken to make sure LNER orders only what it needs, there are instances such as short-term changes to services that can result in an excess of an item. That’s when, in partnership with Gate Gourmet, it teams up with suppliers, food redistribution organisations, and local charities so nothing goes to waste.

Sara Jenson added: “We’re fortunate to work with some fantastic food charities such as FareShare, The People’s Kitchen and London to Slough Run so we can donate our surplus food to those who can use it. Over six-months in 2024, LNER donated 4,500 hot meals, 4,000 baked goods, 11,000 sandwiches and nearly 17,500 desserts, ensuring our food was not wasted and went to people who needed it.”