Huuskes Green Deal: sustainable nutrition in the healthcare sector

Sustainability is a topic that has become increasingly important in more and more sectors, including healthcare. Sector associations and the Environmental Platform for Care (MPZ) have already started several initiatives to accelerate sustainability in healthcare. The Huuskes Green Deal follows the guidelines that these parties maintain. Huuskes has three important goals with their Green Deal: 

• Encouraging the purchase of sustainable products 
• Reducing food waste 
• Encouraging the use of plant-based products

In this sustainability programme, Huuskes will help its customers from the very first step. It is important to establish a baseline measurement to know which adjustments concerning sustainability need to be made. Huuskes will create a report that provides insight into how many products within the total purchase of an organisation already have a sustainability label. This will allow you to see what changes can be made.

The number of patients and clients generally varies a lot in healthcare, even daily. This causes a lot of uncertainty about the number of patients and clients needing food and drinks within many care institutions. This is part of the reason why much food is wasted in the healthcare sector, and this is an essential theme within the Huuskes Green Deal. 

Huuskes has also launched to Food Waste Meter because of this. It is a practical step-by-step plan for measuring food wastage, supervised by a project manager from Huuskes. A research plan is started, and this will result in a concrete measurement plan. This will not only be used for large kitchens and restaurants; it is useful for small-scale residential groups as well. A special registration app is used for this, which shows measurements from various departments in a practical way.

It is essential to also make employees more aware of sustainability to improve the entire organisation's sustainability. Many people lack knowledge about sustainability, so they make wrong choices unintentionally. Changes within an organisation can only be truly implemented by not only creating objectives and policies but by also actively improving the knowledge of employees. An e-learning course called ‘Sustainable nutrition in the healthcare sector’ has been developed for this purpose. Employees will become more aware of how they can contribute to a more sustainable way 

of dealing with nutrition during this e-learning course. Not only to reduce food waste but to also eat more plant-based products and purchasing food and drinks more sustainably.