9
Academic Venues
How is catering
evolving?
to cater for a larger group, but also
offers smaller breakout rooms for
in-depth seminars if required. With
this in mind, Leeds Trinity University
has invested £5.7m in a new
learning centre; a building that offers
first class and modern facilities ideal
for not only teaching and learning,
but also conferencing. This includes
a collaboration room with bespoke
desks that integrate with other
tables, providing flexibility for a
number of group sizes.
Academic venues offer exciting
spaces for conferences outside of
the typical hotel arena, allowing
organisers to add value by tapping
into the expertise of leading
professors and lecturers from a
range of academic disciplines.
Bill Brogan, Conference &
Catering Manager at St
John’s College, Cambridge
We have recognised that we
need to continually review
what we offer to meet
customer needs and also
improve our environmental
credentials.
Some of our recent
initiatives have included
holding insect tasting
sessions to try out the
growing market for edible
insects with such dishes as
Cricket Biscuits, Queen
Leafcutter Ants and Butter
Fudge with Buffalo Worms. As
yet we have not introduced
these in our menus but it
certainly raised awareness of
sustainable catering options.
Responding to the growing
number of Chinese students
and visitors led me to
co-author a book in
conjunction with TUCO (The
University Caterers’
Organisation). We created an
88-page ‘Practical Guide To
Chinese Food’ that gives
catering departments in
academic venues help to
cook authentic Chinese
dishes.
Recently we have become
the first Oxbridge College to
invest in the food monitoring
technology to track food
waste and increase
sustainability. The Chef’s Eye
food reduction software
enables food waste to be
weighed and tracked which
has led to the introduction of
measures to make our
kitchen more efficient
including more batch cooking,
careful ordering to eliminate
over-purchasing and in some
cases, cooking on demand.
What issues are the most
important for clients?
Judith Sloane, deputy manager, Meet Cambridge
AV is always top of the agenda but increasingly (and this is an
area that we can excel in) is the need to be able to tap into the
University’s expertise. We act as facilitators, helping to connect
people with people, whether that’s an organiser looking to find
a great speaker or a corporate organisation seeking
opportunities for collaboration.
We’re also acutely aware that organisers are increasingly
looking for venues with green credentials, as academic venues,
many of the spaces that we promote are already monitoring
their environmental impact and looking at ways to help
organisers make meetings more sustainable. We have recently
joined the Green Tourism initiative and we’re working with a
number of our venues on achieving accreditation, as part of this
we’re working on a carbon calculator which will enable
organisers to calculate the carbon footprint of their event when
its held at one of our academic venues. Many of the
organisations using our academic venues are doing so because
they have a commitment to social responsibility, they know that
profit generated by commercial activity is used in support of
core educational functions at the property; the opportunity to
hold an event while being able to give something back is
attractive to organisers.
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