Serving food and drink with a social purpose
SAP is a market leader in enterprise application software, helping companies of all sizes and in all industries run at their best. We helped SAP (UK) Limited to create a social enterprise café within its head office that does more than just serve brilliant food and coffee – it does good for the community and planet too.
Having joined the Buy Social Corporate Challenge, just like us, SAP (UK) Limited is a big believer in the power of social procurement. So much so that it has launched a global commitment to encourage social enterprise and diverse supplier spend through its 5 & 5 by ‘25 initiative. Social Enterprises are purpose led businesses providing goods or services which reinvest or donate at least 50% of profits towards creating positive social change. So, it makes sense that it would like its head office café to include brands that do good.
We conducted a bespoke review of SAP (UK) Limited’s entire food and beverage spend and worked with the business to implement and switch from a number of its existing suppliers to include social enterprise suppliers into the café offering. SAP (UK) Limited’s employees were heavily involved in the product selection process, with several tasting events and surveys to ensure they supported the changes.
The coffee tasting results were astounding with 93% of staff choosing the new social enterprise supplier, Change Please; a coffee brand serving up cups to help the homeless by training them to be baristas and donates 100% of its profits towards this.
In total, we implemented ten social enterprise suppliers for the SAP café. Foodbuy and SAP (UK) Limited also work with several local, craft, artisan and B-Corp suppliers across other areas of their food provision. Some of the social enterprise suppliers we introduced them to include Nemi Teas and Toast Ale. Nemi Teas is a tea company giving refugees employment opportunities. Toast Ale is a craft beer business that brews using surplus fresh bread that would otherwise be wasted – helping to fight food waste.
Thanks to brands like these, SAP (UK) Limited is now able to demonstrate its commitment to social procurement and the social value that can be made by working with social enterprises from within its head office.
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Our client, SAP, said: “Foodbuy carried out a thorough investigation of the UK Social Enterprise food and beverage suppliers that we could potentially use in our Feltham and Maidenhead cafés and restaurants, and were instrumental in us achieving our objective to provide services to our business and employees that had a social impact. Foodbuy took on our request with great vigour and supported us throughout the process, including the sampling of the various products and arranging tea and coffee tasting sessions for our employees. Without doubt, Foodbuy fully hit our brief and exceeded our expectations.”
With a social enterprise café in place, it provides a great way to promote brands that are building a better world, not to mention SAP (UK) Limited employees can now choose to buy social and have a real, tangible impact on communities and the environment, whilst picking up their morning coffee.
SAP is now expanding its work with social enterprises outside of the UK and implementing similar programmes globally across its offices.
