Customer wellbeing

What is the issue?

Why is this relevant to our business?

What are we doing?

How are we being a force for good?

What is the issue?

The growing global demand for goods and services and demand for new and innovative products puts stress on our environment and our planet's natural resources. To ensure we can continue to provide our customers with the goods and services they want, we need to find more sustainable ways to source our food and other key raw materials, such as cotton and timber. In addition to being careful about how we source our food, we need to ensure it is balanced and nutritious. With the rising rates of obesity in the UK and the associated health risks, such as Type 2 Diabetes, it is important that people have information about the nutritional content of what they eat and drink so they can take responsibility for their health and make appropriate choices. 

Why is this relevant to our business?

As the UK's leading Hospitality Company with over 2,200 outlets (in the UK) and operations in 26 countries across the world, 20 million customers a month in the UK eat, drink and sleep with us. Those customers want to know that they can trust the products they buy and that we are sourcing responsibly on their behalf. They want to know the workers who make our products are treated well, that we are reducing our impact on the environment and we respect the communities in which we operate.

What are we doing?

Customer Wellbeing is one of the 3 key pillars in our Good Together Programme.

Our aim is to make lives better for our customers by providing goods and services they can trust and helping them make informed choices. Our programmes include sustainable sourcing, menu development and customer engagement.

How are we being a force for good?

We have looked across our extremely broad and varied supply chain and considered the environmental and social implications of every single category of goods and services that we buy, identified the highest risk products and set ourselves the goal of achieving sustainable ways of sourcing for all of these. We are working with our suppliers to understand how quickly we can achieve this whilst continuing to provide our guests with the value they expect from our brands. Our Food and Beverage team are working with the Department of Health to support the Government Health Pledges and we are continually improving the nutritional content and information about our meals. Full nutritional information for every dish we serve in every restaurant is now available on our brand websites.

- Sustainable Sourcing

- We continue to serve 100% RFA certified Costa Coffee in all countries, except in India, where we will meet this target in June 2012

- We know local sourcing is important to our customers so all pork, beef and poultry sourced for Costa  in the UK is from British Farms

- All our meat, wherever it is sourced, is produced to stringent animal welfare standards which endorse the international Farm Animal Welfare Council's (FAWC) Five Freedoms  principles.

- Menu development

- We introduced calorific values on our menus in our Thyme Restaurants within our Premier Inns, and provide full nutritional information for every dish we serve in our Restaurants on our brand websites, whilst Costa will be providing calorie information in store from May 2012 across the UK.

- We are well on our way to meeting the Department of Health's 2012 salt targets which will collectively deliver a further 15% reduction on 2010 targets. All our soups already meet these targets.

- We offer more choice of fruit and vegetables on our children's menus in line with the Food Standards Agency's 5-a-day guidelines.

- Customer engagement

- We received over 800,000 responses to our customer surveys this year in Premier Inn and Restaurants and here is what we learned:

- 70% of  our customers are concerned about the environment and climate change

- 48% said they are likely to choose a hotel based on its good environmental track record

- 59% agreed Premier Inn is an environmentally friendly organisation

-  58% rated our restaurants' environmental performance as good or very good

- Learn more about our sustainable sourcing programme

- Read more information about our work on food health and menu development

- See more about our customer engagement programme

See a summary of our new 5 year customer wellbeing targets