Earth Day 2023 | Working towards a more sustainable food delivery industry

By Jaz Rabadia, Head of Responsible Business & Sustainability, Just Eat Takeaway.com

At Just Eat Takeaway.com, we want to use our scale and influence to drive a more sustainable future for the food delivery industry. And as part of this, play an active role in supporting innovation and the development of solutions that will benefit the world around us.

From tackling plastic pollution to finding ways to reduce food waste, we’re committed to taking steps to help our partners and the wider food delivery industry flourish in a way that doesn’t harm our planet. 

We’re pleased to be able to celebrate Earth Day and mark some of our more recent achievements in supporting our network become more sustainable:

Reducing single use plastics

We’re committed to tackling the use of single-use plastics in the industry and while there is still a long way to go in finding credible alternatives for various cuisine types when it comes to traditional plastic packaging, we’re proud of where we’ve got to. One of the ways we’re doing this is through our long-running partnership with Earthshot prize winner, Notpla. We’ve been working together since 2018 and we’ve now rolled out sustainable seaweed-lined takeaway boxes to eight markets, including The UK, The Netherlands, Germany, Austria, Spain, Ireland, Belgium and Poland. The packaging is home-compostable, recyclable, contains no synthetic chemicals and can degrade in a matter of weeks. 

To ensure we cater for a variety of different food options we also use reusable solutions in markets including Germany and Austria. We continue to look for new and innovative ways to help reduce the use of single-use plastic in the industry. 

Food Waste

Reducing avoidable food waste is a great way we can tackle the carbon footprint of takeaway meals and make a positive impact on the environment. Last year, we worked with charity Hubbub to research the impact of food waste across 4 of our markets. This looked at some of the reasons behind consumers wasting takeaway food and ways we could address this, such as giving inspiration to customers on how to better store and remix their leftovers.

Our SkipTheDishes team in Canada launched its Do Good Deal earlier this year where customers are able to get end-of-day discounts on unsold menu items that would have otherwise gone to waste. The project has so far been launched in Vancouver and Winnipeg, with plans to roll out to more cities.

Carbon Labelling 

To help consumers better understand the carbon impact when choosing a meal on the app or web, we launched a carbon labelling trial in the UK last month.

Alongside My Emissions, a leading provider of food carbon calculations and labelling, Just Eat UK is working with five restaurant partners to display a ‘traffic light’ carbon rating next to main meals. The ratings take into account the farming, production, transport and packaging of the dishes. It’s a first of its kind trial for a UK delivery platform and we’re excited to see the results. 

Veganuary

We aim to empower customers’ food choices while responding to changing dietary needs and preferences. In January, we supported the Veganuary challenge for a third year running. We used a multi-channel communication campaign to engage our customers globally. We sent over 10 mln newsletters promoting the best vegan and vegetarian restaurants and partnered with hundreds of local restaurants and multinational partners including Domino’s and Burger King to provide offers and deals on vegan and vegetarian meals.

Electric vehicle transition

Our courier hubs in continental Europe are kitted out with bikes, e-bikes, and e-scooters. Compared with a typical petrol-powered delivery model, our own delivery model has therefore an emission intensity up to nine times lower, depending on the market. And on top of that, we are continuing to explore opportunities for transitioning 100% of our corporate and sales car fleet to electric vehicles by 2030.

Through our continued efforts, we hope to encourage even more positive, sustainable change that will benefit our partners and consumers whilst reducing the impact we have on the  planet. From finding sustainable alternatives to plastic packaging to using our insights to help tackle food waste, we look forward to continuing to do what we can to help build a more sustainable future in food delivery.