Annelie Selander
Chief Sustainability Officer at WSH
You may not have heard of Westbury Street Holdings (WSH).
However, you will be familiar with some of the many hospitality brands it owns and manages.
They include:
- Benugo cafes and restaurants, at locations including the V&A Museum and Greenwich Park, London
- Searcy’s, the UK’s oldest catering business, founded in 1847
- Notes coffee shops and bars, which are located at landmark London spots, including The Gherkin and Canary Wharf
- Brook Foods, with 29 workplace restaurants across Ireland
- Meyers, a Danish company that offers catering, restaurants, canteens and bakeries.
In all, WSH owns 13 businesses, all of which offer different services within the hospitality industry.
WIth sustainability such a critical subject and the hospitality industry still relying on long supply lines, driving down GHG emissions in the various firms is no easy task.
Annelie Selander is not daunted, though.
Annelie is WSH’s Chief Sustainability Officer and has a real passion for cutting carbon and handing over a living, breathing planet to the generations to come.
Annelie spoke to Sustainability Magazine about the recipe for sustainability success.
Please outline your sustainability leadership background
When I first got involved in sustainability, it was still called CSR, when I was Marketing Director for an established coffee brand. Ethical considerations and conduct were high on the agenda and we would discuss different certifications and whether our focus should be on people or the environment - as if there could be a choice.
I’ve since gone on to develop and deploy two sustainability strategies, both in the food industry: one for a leading pan-European frozen food business and one for WSH.
I’m all about impact and want to believe that ‘strategy into action’ is my superpower.
WSH is a collection of businesses across catering and hospitality, built around an ethos of fresh, local and seasonal food prepared and served by our brilliant teams. This makes WSH a great starting point for delivering an even more sustainable offer.
We always say that our teams are hungry for change in our industry and with Second Nature, our ESG strategy, in place, we are uniting to take positive action on sustainability. We currently cover seven geographies in the UK and Europe, employ more than 26,000 people at over 3,000 sites and estimate we serve more than 2.6 million customers daily. If we can enrol all of them as ambassadors for change, that’s the impact we can have.
What does your current role involve?
As CSO for WSH, I oversee our ESG programme, shaping, communicating and tracking our social and environmental sustainability commitments. I chair our ESG Board and engage with our different teams and businesses every week to galvanise and drive positive change. Recently, we recruited more than 50 internal sustainability ambassadors eager to go on the journey with us.
How involved were you in the WSH roadmap for net zero?
Our commitment to Net Zero sits under Step Up, one of the four pillars of our ESG programme, meaning identifying emissions-related data, capturing, reporting and analysing it, leading action planning and developing initiatives is led by the Step Up working group lead, who reports to me.
As we have been building the roadmap, understanding our most significant impact areas - where we have more direct control and influence - has been vital. To make it actionable for our teams, we’ve provided each business with their individual CCF and agreed reduction targets and priorities for each of them. We know we need to look both short and long-term at absolute reduction and intensity to reduce our impact.
Even if there are similarities within an industry, each business is unique and only when you start to understand the specifics of your business will you get the actions right. We operate mainly as guests in someone else’s space, meaning we have less control over certain areas and certain decisions: as such, we need to take a different approach to influence waste and energy management, for example.
Change takes time. Knowing what we should be doing is different from getting it done. The importance of communication and reaching the right people with the right messages is a critical hurdle to overcome. Offering different alternatives that all lead to the same end goal, rather than looking for a "one size fits nobody" solution, is essential.
How important are verified net zero targets?
Very. Our decision to align Second Nature Strategy with SBTi’s global net-zero standard was driven by the need to address emissions and protect nature impacted by the food industry, but more specifically, within the hospitality industry. The rationale for a verified net zero target was never questioned, even if we recognised the difficulty of delivering it.
What clarity does the SBTi Standard bring to your decision making?
This framework is instrumental in guiding WSH’s strategic planning and decision-making processes, ensuring its sustainability goals are grounded in scientific evidence.
The SBTi Standard ensures our emissions targets are ambitious and aligned with the global objective of limiting warming to 1.5°C. This alignment underscores WSH’s commitment to playing its part in mitigating climate change and it also sets a high bar for our family of businesses.
SBTi also offers stakeholders greater credibility and transparency about WSH’s commitment to sustainability. By adopting the SBTi Standard, WSH can demonstrate to its stakeholders - including customers, employees and investors - that its sustainability commitments are aspirational and backed by rigorous, science-based targets.
What were the main net zero roadmap challenges you faced?
Preparing the roadmap to net zero presented significant challenges, with the Scope 3 supply chain emissions being a major hurdle. The complexity and diversity of our supply chain makes it more challenging to measure and control these emissions accurately.
By being clear on the methodologies we use, understanding our data gaps and ensuring that improving data access and accuracy is part of the roadmap, we will gradually improve our plans.
Despite data challenges, we developed a first strategy to tackle our emissions and are implementing agreed actions focusing on three key areas: menu decarbonisation, waste reduction and behaviour change. Our decentralised approach allows us to tackle these issues head-on.
Carbon-assessing recipes and menus, introducing carbon labelling where it makes sense, sourcing lower-impact, responsibly grown ingredients and promoting plant-based options will help to decarbonise our menus while still providing tasty, nutritious and inspiring choices. Our waste reduction initiatives focus on food waste at a site level but look at optimising choices to minimise overall waste generation.
We have a longstanding ambition to reduce the number of disposables we use in favour of reusable options. The above includes educating and encouraging our employees, clients and customers to adopt more sustainable practices, nudging behaviour change and encouraging with a carrot, not a stick.
How is the hospitality industry faring on science-based net-zero targets?
We believe the hospitality industry needs to catch up on setting science-based net-zero targets and hope we can set a new standard with our ambitious 2040 net-zero goal. We think of ourselves as a leader in the industry, with a history of demonstrating a solid commitment to sustainability and a proactive approach to tackling climate change.
Our roadmap is not only ambitious but also sets a benchmark for the industry to engage with and follow. While there are currently c4,500 companies globally with a validated target, there are fewer than 20 businesses with a verified 2040 net zero target.
Where are you on your sustainability journey?
We are only at the beginning of the journey and have so far refined our operations and strategy to adopt a net-zero roadmap that aligns with the SBTi standards in four ways:
- We established an ESG Board to oversee progress against the ESG agenda and provided them with carbon literacy training
- WSH formed four action groups, each dedicated to a strategic pillar of our sustainability agenda - ensuring a structured and focused approach towards achieving our targets
- We have appointed a WSH board member as a sponsor for each group. This high-level involvement underscores the importance of sustainability and ensures that the goals are better understood and integrated
- Internal reporting. We have agreed on individual targets with each of our businesses and implemented regular tracking and KPI reporting to drive awareness. We monitor our progress and identify areas for improvement to ensure we understand how we track against our net-zero targets. Reporting is made available for each business and provides an overall picture of performance for WSH.
What underpins the success of the Second Nature Strategy?
Working groups responsible for operational execution and translating strategic ideas into tangible steps have been established. Regular tracking and reporting mechanisms have been implemented. These mechanisms monitor progress towards sustainability goals, identify areas for improvement and ensure accountability.
In addition, collaboration with stakeholders and suppliers is actively encouraged. WSH believes achieving sustainability goals is a collective effort and is committed to driving sustainable practices across the supply chain.
How do you track and assess data-driven target setting?
Data-driven target setting is a critical component of any successful net-zero strategy. It provides a clear, quantifiable roadmap for businesses, ensuring transparency and accountability in their sustainability efforts. One of the critical plans put in place to track progress and decrease environmental impact is the measurement of baseline data across all KPIs
In our business, over 98% of the corporate carbon footprint lies in Scope 3, primarily in the supply chain. Employing a data-driven approach helps identify major impact areas efficiently, focusing on our significant emission categories and major suppliers.
We invested time in collecting data on current emissions and environmental impacts, using it as a starting point to measure progress and establish quantifiable targets aligned with the overarching goal of achieving net-zero emissions.
To ensure accuracy, we combined primary and secondary data to calculate the corporate carbon footprint for 2019 and 2022.
The data-driven approach is the solution businesses need to ensure net zero because it provides a clear and objective measure of progress. It allows companies to track their environmental impact in real time, identify areas for improvement and hold themselves accountable for their sustainability commitments.
What sustainability-roadmap lessons have you learned?
Creating a roadmap to net-zero emissions is a rewarding and sometimes complicated process. As a business, WSH has learned three key lessons that could benefit other businesses embarking on a similar journey:
- It is essential to involve all stakeholders early in the process and ensure their continued involvement. Fostering a sense of ownership and commitment towards the sustainability goals from the outset is crucial.
- Set ambitious long-term targets broken down into achievable near-term targets. The environmental agenda is fast evolving, and while we are still determining how we will deliver net zero, we know we can't afford to wait. You will rightly become accountable for these targets in the future, so to ensure credibility and effectiveness, they should align with third-party scientific standards, such as SBTi.
- Data-driven insights are golden. Regular tracking of progress and adapting strategies based on these insights ensures that your approach remains effective and responsive to changing circumstances.
To read the full story in the magazine click HERE
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