Taste Imperial thrills with its tasters at the Property Division Expo
You may have spotted the Taste Imperial team at the Property Division Expo on Tuesday, 4th February! This free and open showcase gave the different teams the opportunity to display and discuss how we are all working to improve our campuses and the services we provide.
Our team was excited to see so many smiling and enthusiastic faces at our stand. As well as the display of our sustainable food practices and our Lunch for Less scheme, we invited people to our Vegan Croissant Challenge.
With one crate containing vegan croissants, and one containing non-vegan, we asked our students and staff to try both and guess which one was vegan – and we were pleased to find that out of 180 samples, our delicious vegan croissants were mistaken as non-vegan 162 times!
“The taste is just smoother,” commented one croissant-sampler. If you are curious to test it out yourself, we sell vegan plain, pain au chocolat, apricot, and mixed berry croissants across our South Kensington campus.
You may have also caught up with our Development and Mobilisation Chef John Cavalli promoting our Forage for Sustainability initiative Friday Fridge Forage, the project where we invite students to make use of their leftover ingredients. John cooked up moreish tasters of flatbreads and maple chipotle chicken skewers that he created with student Hana in November’s Friday Fridge Forage. The booklets for the recipe were snapped up just as quickly as the samples!
Our free tasters did not stop there – alongside an example of the mouth-watering curry we sell across campus, we also showcased our LN2 poached nitrogen meringues, a sweet treat made with egg whites, sugar, and liquid nitrogen.
Finally, we were also handing out a taste of our vegan aquafaba mayonnaise that we use on campus. We save 26,000 eggs and 1,700 plastic tubs a year making this mayo with aquafaba from tinned chickpeas, which is all part of our mission to reduce food and packaging waste.
Thank you to everyone who came to see us and took part, and to our enthusiastic and friendly team for making the event such a fun and interactive experience. The Taste Imperial team looks forward to the next time it can showcase what it does for the campus environment behind the scenes.
“It’s good to see that Imperial isn’t just a student factory,” said a student, “Other universities pump the students in and out, you don’t get the sense they care. You can see Imperial is always striving to do more.”