Since opening Shambles we’ve always wanted to do things the right way!
We don’t often mention our sustainable goals (small or big) and the work that goes on behind the scenes, which ranges from donating bones to your fury friends, rendering down fat for cooking, drying skins to create flavoured salts, pickling and fermenting techniques to prevent food waste or creating recipes from surplus ingredients for our team lunches and dinners. We aim for 100% of our scrape food waste to be sent to anaerobic digestion where it’s turned into biogas for reusable energy, and our used cooking oil from the chip fryers are taken away to produce fuel to power vehicles. Lately we have reduced the amount of ‘dry goods’ deliveries we receive each week to help cut our carbon footprint and to add a small contribution to decongesting our roads.
As our ambitions grow, we’ve focus on building a restaurant with integrity, so that we can prioritise the things we care about most. When it comes to sourcing meat, we champion small, British, and often family-run farms, where traditional farming techniques have been learnt and upheld across generations, ensuring we are working with the best in the business and supporting diverse ecosystems. The attention to detail these farmers employ is second to none, with animal husbandry and farming in harmony with nature at the forefront of everything they do. Our suppliers make regular trips to visit and inspect the abattoirs they are slaughtered, ensures total traceability, and instils in us the confidence that these animals are being cared for in the most humane and ethical way. We also encourage regenerative agriculture and proper management of pastureland that offsets and removes the carbon from our atmosphere.
Our fishmonger is ‘BY APPOINTMENT TO HRH THE PRINCE OF WALES SUPPLIER OF FRESH CORNISH SEAFOODS’, the team is active in their local community, passing on information about fish patterns and changes affected by climate to support research. They also work with schools, businesses and charities in association with the Royal Academy of Culinary Arts, to help educate the next generation of consumers and chefs about fishing and sustainability.
Key practices we follow are sourcing local, seasonal produce and growing some of our own ingredients onsite. We plan to continue to increase our yield throughout the whole year, so we can continue reducing our footprint and provide our guests with even fresher produce.
Our wines are carefully selected from either producers implementing sustainable best practices and/or come from vineyards that are restoring a biodiverse ecosystem to produce exceptional organic produce.
We use toiletries from ‘MadeKind‘, they’re a small local business in Teddington that have a vision to create natural, plant-based cleaning products, free from harmful chemicals. We have our plastic kitchen chopping boards regularly resurfaced, which saves up to 70% of our carbon output, compared to replacing them with brand new boards and sending the old ones to landfill each time. We collect all our used wine corks and send them to TheCorkArtCo who then turns them into art & crafts for us to place around the restaurant.
Not long ago we were contacted by BT and Small Business Britain and asked if they could spotlight Shambles in a short film for ‘The Willow Review’ a government-backed review to help encourage and inspire other small businesses, like us, who want to follow a more sustainable path and to help show the financial benefits of sustainability in business. Watch here
What’s next? We’re planning to put some of our managerial team through carbon literacy training courses, to encourage and support them in helping Shambles cut emissions and prevent further water and food waste in and around the restaurant and our supply chains.
We’re working towards having the whole team thinking about how to make improvements, no matter how big or small. We’re doing this because we want to ‘not because it’s cool and trendy’, it’s the kind of business we want to run and one we want to be proud of.
We hope that you feel the same and we look forward to sharing our ongoing journey together.