Food

Naturally Fast Food

Nutrition

“Eat food, not too much, mostly plants”

Food should taste good and do you good. And the Mediterranean diet, our inspiration, does exactly that. It’s full of plants, fresh herbs, spices, good fats from olive oil, seeds and nuts and well-sourced meat. Michael Pollan said it best in his book “In Defence of Food:” “Eat food, not too much, and mostly plants”.

We work closely with nutritionists to make sure that our menu offers options for everyone, whatever you requirements. We also use Children’s Food Trust guidelines to help create a balanced and nutritious children’s menu, keeping sugar, salt and saturated fat to a minimum.

All our nutritional figures on the menu pages are provided as guidelines. They are all correct to the best of our knowledge but may vary occasionally with ingredient provenance and seasonality.

We use a range of nutritional symbols to help you quickly identify the dishes we have on offer.

Sustainability

Our sustainability strategy is focused on three specific goals: increasing the number of plants on our menu, renewable energy, and reducing our use of plastics. 

We’ve invested a lot of time in finding a better way to do business, but we know there’s a lot more we can do, including our next aim of becoming carbon neutral.

The SRA’s rating criteria acknowledges the holistic approach to sustainability and, like our thinking, is based on three pillars: Sourcing, Society & Environment

Sourcing

Celebrate Local & Seasonal

Food tastes best when it’s in season, and our menu celebrates those natural rhythms.
We only use British meat across our menu. Our eggs are free-range and British too.

More Plants, Better Meat

A significant amount of our menu is vegan or vegetarian and the focus is on those dishes being as tasty as they can be.

And with meat, the emphasis is on serving less but better quality, and using plants to fill the gap. 

Leon is committed to meeting the welfare standards set by the European Chicken Commitment for 100% of our chicken by 2026 throughout our European Supply Chain.
We support the work that the Humane League have done in campaigning towards the European Chicken Commitment and encourage them to go even further and work with farmers to help them supply this product in a sustainable way that is also affordable to customers.
We always endeavour to work with and support the most sustainable suppliers and partners and we will continue to work with the Humane League to find a clear and transparent solution to the CO2 and sustainability impact the new method of chicken farming brings, as it becomes commercially available.

We have made great progress with our sourcing in recent years. We source from the UK and already meet a number of the Better Chicken Commitment promises: our chickens are never caged or in multi-tier systems and always have high-quality air on their farms. They have perch-able space, hay bales and other peck-able things to keep them stimulated.

We visit our chicken farms regularly and we know our chickens have room, daylight, and are well looked after. Our sourcing has a low carbon footprint, though we do know the more sustainable option is to increase the number of plant-based dishes on our menu so we’re working on that.

Source Responsibly

The fish in our fish fingers is rated ‘1-2’ (‘Fish to Eat’) on the Marine Conservation Society’s rating, and is line- caught from sustainable shoals. 

We use higher welfare British meat as standard across our menu.

Support Global Farmers

We can’t source everything locally, so when we do venture further afield, we keep the same principles and only buy fairly-traded products. Like our coffee. It’s Fairtrade (better for the farmers who grow the beans), Organic (tastes better and is better for the soil it’s grown in), and proceeds from every bag we sell go to the World Land Trust. They buy and conserve big areas of rainforest, and last year alone we helped to buy over 100 acres of rainforest and purchase a new nature reserve in Honduras, where we source our beans.

Society

Treat Team Fairly

Treat Staff Fairly

We pay all of our team members above National Living Wage. We promote flexible working, including lots of part-time roles.

Support the Community

Our co-founders John Vincent and Henry Dimbleby co-wrote The School Food Plan, which resulted in dramatic changes to school food with the introduction of Universal Infant Free School Meals. This was more than free school meals – it was a way of getting cooking on the national curriculum for the first time and beginning a culture shift in how food is grown, taught, prepared and eaten in schools.

Feed People Well

We make sure everyone who works at LEON gets the same opportunity to eat well and live well. We provide free LEON food during paid lunch breaks and give our team members 60% discount outside of their shifts. Healthy eating is at the heart of our culture, so much so that nutrition training is the first thing on the list for new members of the LEON team.

Environment

Value Natural Resources

All of our restaurants are powered by 100% green energy; a mix of wind, solar, hydro and anaerobic digestion and use LED lighting to make them more energy efficient.

Reduce Reuse Recycle

We’re constantly trying to reduce the amount of plastic we use. Earlier this year we replaced plastic cutlery and straws with biodegradable and paper alternatives.

In the restaurants where we’re responsible for our waste, we’re always zero waste-to-landfill, meaning our waste is given a new lease of life.

Waste no food

Food waste is unnecessary and expensive. All of our restaurants must stick to the target of having nothing leftover at the end of the day. We make our food fresh to order and judge our forecasts based on the weather, the day of the week (we know you prefer salads on Mondays and Tuesdays, and burgers and wraps at the weekend), and the sales we had on the same day last year. This means there’s almost nothing left over at the end of each day. But whatever is left is sent to anaerobic digestion.

Alternatively, if you know of a charity near to any of our restaurants who might want to pick up any leftover food, please let us know.

Leon Presents