TUCO Online partners with My Emissions to deliver instant carbon labelling and reporting to UK Universities and Colleges

TUCO (The University Caterers Organisation) has announced a new partnership with My Emissions to provide fully integrated carbon emissions calculations, labelling, and reporting for UK universities and colleges via its e-procurement platform, TUCO Online.

TUCO Online, powered by Access Procure Wizard, enables universities to manage procurement, menu planning, recipes, allergens, and nutrition within a single platform. It is currently used by nearly 50 universities operating across 600+ sites. In total, there are more than 30,000 recipes on and almost 10 million items purchased through the platform annually.

As universities and colleges face increasing pressure to meet Net Zero targets and respond to growing climate awareness among students, food and drink emissions have become an important area of focus. Yet until now, calculating the carbon footprint of menus and procurement data has been a manual, fragmented, and time-consuming process.

My Emissions was selected as the carbon partner following a tender process, and has already developed a fully-functioning integration with TUCO Online.

This represents one of the largest coordinated efforts in the UK to measure and reduce emissions from university catering.

A Seamless, Scalable Solution

Sustainability is a key priority for many Universities, but without an integrated tool any action requires significant data entry. For example, to carbon label a menu chefs were required to re-enter menus into a separate system.

A key objective of the project was to eliminate the need for manual data entry. Using the data already stored within TUCO Online, the integration gives users access to:

• Carbon footprint calculations for all recipes and dishes in their account.
• Carbon labelling using My Emissions’ A–E carbon rating system, which can be displayed on menus.
• Dashboard insights that help identify high-emission recipes and ingredients, enabling targeted emission reductions.

Currently this data, including the carbon label, is available via My Emissions’ own platform, with all data filled automatically. In time, this will become visible directly in the TUCO Online platform.

A future phase of the integration will allow users to automatically calculate total emissions from purchased food and drink, using procurement data within TUCO Online. This will support universities and colleges in reporting and tracking their Scope 3 emissions from catering services, helping them to measure the broader impact of their sustainability initiatives.

Importantly, all costs for TUCO Online Members are covered by TUCO, enabling this powerful new feature to be rolled out at scale.

Mike Haslin, TUCO CEO, said:

“We are delighted to have partnered with My Emissions to enable our members to calculate the carbon footprint of their menus. The integration with TUCO Online is seamless, allowing catering teams to view results quickly and make adjustments with ease. Reduction of carbon emissions remains a major challenge in our industry, and this partnership helps support our members in meeting their institution’s sustainability targets, with no additional costs.”

Matthew Isaacs, Co-founder of My Emissions, commented on the scale and ambition of the project:

“This partnership marks a huge step forward for sustainability in higher education. By integrating our carbon calculations and labelling directly into TUCO Online, we’re putting emissions data in the hands of chefs, buyers, and sustainability teams across nearly 50 universities. With just a few clicks, and no manual data entry, they can make informed, data-driven decisions to reduce their food emissions at scale.”

Already Live with Leading Universities

7 TUCO Online Members have already signed up, including: Imperial College London, University of Nottingham, University of Bristol, University of East Anglia, Anglia Ruskin University, Loughborough University, Magdalene College - University of Cambridge.

Ella Shepherd, Catering Operations Manager at Imperial College London, shared her thoughts on the value of the system:

“This integration is an essential step in improving our sustainability reporting, and supporting our Sustainable Food Policy. We want to empower students to make informed food choices through clear carbon labels, rather than imposing restrictions. The automated system finally gives us the data and flexibility we need, something we couldn’t achieve with previous manual tools.”