How Midshire is putting sustainability on the workplace menu

For Midshire Signature Services, the family-owned independent caterer operating across more than 65 sites, that shift plays to a long-held belief – that genuine sustainability cannot be rolled out from a central template. It has to be built around each site and each workforce.

“Every business has different targets, a different building and a different mix of people on site on any given day,” says Sue Bradwell, managing director. “As an independent, we don’t just drop in the same package everywhere. We always start with a blank page and build a genuinely sustainable solution around what a client actually needs, not around what is easiest for us to deliver.”

Nowhere is that approach clearer than at United Utilities’ Lingley Mere Business Park in Warrington, where Midshire feeds more than 3,000 people every day. Since taking on the contract in 2023, the team has rebuilt the offer around how people genuinely work, and around the site’s own environmental ambitions. The result feels more ‘’high street’ than canteen with a daily pie range, Friday fish and chips, sourdough pizzas, a homemade doner, and Signature Coffee – Midshire’s own barista brand – all freshly prepared on site.

Leading much of the sustainability work is David Flesher, Midshire’s business systems manager, who first joined the company as an onsite chef at United Utilities before moving into Midshire’s craft development team. His signature project tackles cost and carbon at the same time. Using an Eat Curious base milled from peas and fava beans, David has built a bank of recipes now used across the business – dishes that run at 60 per cent meat and 40 per cent plant protein, or are fully plant-based. These recipes have a lower environmental impact, less saturated fat and no common allergens. They are also around half the cost of meat, so they are popular with consumers who are conscious about sustainability but also rising food costs.

“The brief from clients is consistent – keep food affordable and nutritious, hit our sustainability goals, and don’t shrink the portions,” says David. “Plant protein lets us do all three. It is high in protein and fibre, naturally lower in saturated fat, gluten-free and vegan-friendly, and it works in everything from a curry to a dessert.

“We trialled it at United Utilities through pop-ups, bringing in development chefs to hand out samples, so people could taste it for themselves. We always do this before changing a menu.”

Midshire has also stripped waste and packaging from its operation. Eggs are free-range and sourced within 2.2 miles. Vegetables come from local suppliers, shortening supply chains and cutting food miles. Cooking oil is recycled, and spent coffee grounds are offered free to staff to take home for their gardens. Wherever possible, “naked” products and digital signage have replaced single-use packaging and printed menus. New systems can even display the carbon and CO₂ content of individual dishes, giving its clients the transparency to steer choices against their own targets.

It is the philosophy Midshire sums up as tastes better, wastes less, costs less, with sustainability and value pulling in the same direction rather than competing against one another.

Midshire’s bespoke approach also means understanding how a building actually runs. With hybrid and shift patterns now the norm, Midshire’s workplace solutions have been designed around people’s real working life, offering high-street quality and choice that gives people a genuine reason to come in, and self-service that puts healthy, freshly made meals, rather than a bank of vending machines, within reach out of hours. This summer, the company’s own Graze pre-order app goes live at United Utilities, bringing skip-the-queue ordering, clear dietary and allergen information and loyalty offers, all under the client’s own brand.

The model is now being rolled out across Midshire’s estate, from workplaces to colleges.
“Sustainability cannot be an add-on, and it cannot be off-the-shelf,” says Bradwell. “The businesses we work with want a partner who will sit down, understand their goals and build something that genuinely moves the needle for their people and for the planet. That is exactly what an independent like us is built to do.”

In a market dominated by large national operators, that blend of environmental rigour and bespoke, hands-on service is increasingly rare and, on the evidence at United Utilities, increasingly valuable.

As featured in Contract Catering Magazine (July/August 2026)