Reducing Waste at MM

Reducing our waste and eliminating single use plastic are hugely important to MM and we are committed to initiatives that help us to achieve this. Some of the things we have worked on so far include:

Food waste

Our food is produced freshly on a daily basis – and MM executive chef, Gabriele Bagni, works with all of our vendors on their recipes and ingredient sourcing to ensure that they are wasting as little as possible.

We joined forces with Too Good To Go in 2018, a Danish food waste start-up that provides
a platform to help traders sell surplus food at the end of the day – a model that helps vendors, customers and the planet.

Our partnership with Too Good To Go has saved 1,077 meals, 2,154kg of CO2 and 9,262 minutes of driving. So far, over 500 customers have collected surplus food from MM.

Plastic & packaging

We use sustainable vehicles for deliveries and waste collection to minimise fossil fuel use and air pollution, and we recycle all of our packaging – including glass and cardboard.

You won’t find any single use plastic in our markets – bowls, plates, cups and cutlery are all plant-based and biodegradable. Once used, these are collected alongside the food waste and sent for anaerobic digestion, a process that breaks down organic matter to produce fuel and fertiliser.

Switching to recycled glass water bottles means we are saving over 50,000 single-use plastic water bottles every year.

This year, MM customers can purchase pasta, rice, pulses, dried fruits and nuts by weight in our retail space (La Drogheria) without the need for plastic or single-use packaging, helping to reduce waste in store and at home.

Since September 2018, MM has partnered with Paper Round on its waste management, helping to ensure that our office waste is as minimal as waste from the market.

Water

At MM, we’ve made it a primary goal to provide healthy water with minimal food miles – instead of water contained in plastic bottling, that goes unrecycled and transmits plastic fibres into our systems. By adding water refill points across the market, we joined the London Refill Campaign in fighting plastic waste and providing our customers with access to water.

We are now trialling the free distribution of re-mineralised water produced by the German Kraft Brewery, by offering this water to MM staff and all our trading partners. The aim is to expand this offer to customers in 2019 once we’re convinced that we can meet the demand.