Our Sustainability Journey

From our launch by Peter and John in May 2006 we have been interested in minimising our environmental impacts. Our initial objective when we opened our Coffee Shop on Glossop Road in Sheffield was summed up by our first strapline – “Selectively sourced, locally loyal”.

From the start we recognised that it was wrong to simply jump on the “local food” bandwagon when it was quite clear that many products like coffee and sugar were impossible to source locally.  However, it was possible to carefully source to ensure that the suppliers we used conformed to standards such as Fairtrade, that they looked at their own sustainability and that they too were working to continuously improve their impacts.  Of course our biggest effort was to champion local food producers which we do to this day.  So South Yorkshire foodie institutions such as Whirlowhall Farm, Moss Valley Farm, Sheffield Honey, Our Cow Molly, Hedgerow Preserves as well as Sheffield Organic Growers have been key suppliers of local fresh produce.

Cooking with Steven Thompson of Moss Valley Farm and Toby Foster

Since moving away from the retail shop side and concentrating on our Attercliffe production premises and venue we have continued our journey to gradually increase the local and sustainable nature of our business.  We now serve seasonally inspired local food for  weddings, corporate lunches, and events, as well as fine dining and dinners through-out Sheffield, South Yorkshire and North Derbyshire.  Despite this change in emphasis we continue to work on improving our sustainability and is summed up by the change to our moto which is now to produce “Seasonally Inspired Local Food”.  It is an on-going journey to develop the food offer and also in a sense educate our clients not to expect asparagus in December.

Upstairs at PJ taste our meeting, dining and event space in Attercliffe, Sheffield

So what our we doing?

1. We aim to operate a “zero waste” kitchen, and coach our team to think creatively about how to use every element of an ingredient. Some simple pieces of equipment are helpful. An example is a dehydrator which is an inexpensive piece of kit and simply converts all the crusts from our loaves into breadcrumbs used in our Sheffield Egg. Gluts of fruit and vegetable harvests can similarly be dehydrated and we find that this intensifies their flavour a win/win. These ideas and more we incorporated into the Climate Change book for which we contributed 60 recipes last year.
   
   

2. We have operated an electric delivery vehicles since 2015, which we re-charge via the 37 solar panels on the roof of our venue in Attercliffe. Issues are high initial purchase costs and we were helped initially by a Sheffield City council initiative lead by Mark Daly. The insurance industry unfortunately does not help as they have consistently charged much higher premiums over the previously used diesel vans. However, we have found our electric vans to be excellent and trouble free from our initial Nissan EV vans to the electric VW transporter van we now have.
   
   

3. Local growing. Over the last five years we have developed a two acre plot as a permaculture style growing area where we can concentrate on perennial growing with a young forest garden, lots of fruit trees and 23 honeybee colonies. Inspiration has come from Charles Dowding in terms of no dig approaches and from Martin Crawford who isnanforest garden and tree expert. Its interesting how there is a movement of sustainable agriculture which is looking at a more traditional closed system of meadow grazing and building fertility on the farm instead of importing artificial nitrogen fertilisers through green house gas intensive processes (Nitrous Oxide is 300 times more damaging than CO2).
   
   Notable harvests this year were Szechuan Peppercorns, Autumn Olive and Mashua
   

4. Foraging. In addition to cultivating crops on our plot we also forage and harvest the wild plants. Plants such as nettles, hogweed and wild garlic are generally available much earlier in the year than crops you can cultivate. We have also run interesting courses on foraging and wild food.

5. Packaging. We have switched to all biodegradable or recyclable packaging and aim to eliminate any packaging wherever possible.

6. Energy use. All our lighting was replaced with LED bulbs and we replaced old refrigeration units with new energy efficient models a number of years ago. These measures over a 3-4 year period have paid for themselves in lower lifetime running costs.

7. Seasonal menu planning - using what’s available locally reduces food miles. In addition we use traditional preservation techniques such as drying, jamming and freezing to make use of seasonal fresh food gluts.

8. Any final organic waste is used for compost in our permaculture style of growing, encompassing fruit trees, interesting perennial vegetables and as a large number of honeybee colonies.

 Training and Education

A key strength of PJ taste is our dedicated team who all understand and work to our shared values.  This helps ensure our customer focus, strengthens our local sourcing mission as well as support and develop our own individual contributions as part of a collaborative team.  Working with Sheffield College through the PJ taste academy we are now also striving to develop the next generation of chefs and caterers.

 PJ taste work with regular clients including The University of Sheffield, the Millennium Galleries, Wake Smith, Twinkle, ITM Power, Highlander, Resolve IT, Sheffield Hallam University, Sheffield Museums Trust, and IMechE.  These companies are becoming increasingly concerned about how we manage sustainability which is a useful driver for our ongoing work in this area.

Across a wide range of options, from simple lunches to plated banquets for 200 people to wood-fired pizza or themed events with Burritos and BBQ's.

 Today, as well as our outside catering services, we have our own unique, lovingly refurbished meeting, dining and event space in Attercliffe - Upstairs@PJtaste –accommodating up to 120 people.