How Sharon McConnell cuts waste while she cooks 

Sharon McConnell is a chef based at one of Sodexo’s Government business client sites in Belfast. She’s usually found creating hearty, low-waste meals for up to 300 people, but this year she was also joint winner of Sodexo’s 2023 Global Sustainable Chef Challenge. Sharon talks about her work to cut food waste and explains why serving hundreds of customers is good preparation for the live cook-off competition.

Cooking for Sodexo has given me a real insight into the demands of our clients and their staff. Here in Belfast, we serve all kinds of customers, some with very physical and demanding jobs which require specialist diets. They have to respond to new challenges daily, and that creates a knock-on challenge for me in terms of food waste, because it can be hard to predict the numbers. There’s five of us in the kitchen, and at any time we could have 100 people more or 100 people less than we expected to feed. 

Even back at school I felt most at home in the kitchen, so a career in catering was always on the cards. I joined Sodexo as a food service assistant 15 years ago and worked my way up. I hate wasting anything, particularly food, so I’ve always tried to keep it down.

Our client is fully supportive of our ambition to reduce our carbon footprint, and food waste is included as one of the contract’s Key Performance Indicators.