gastrostudent · students · sustainability ·Jul 27, 2022

Gastrostudent teams with Virtue Impact for a positive environmental impact

Healthy Student Meals with a Positive Environmental Impact

Gastrostudent combines quality and convenience for students across the UK. Whether you are looking for a vegetarian box or a hangover cure, Gastrostudent provides meals that are good for you and the environment.

What is Gastrostudent?

Anyone knowing the realities of student life will also know the struggles of the student diet. This is usually due to varying degrees of 3 main factors:

lack of time
lack of money
lack of cooking expertise

One member of the Virtue Impact team had a uni diet that was 80% cheddar and potato perogies, so the team at Virtue understand this well.

This is the problem being tackled by Gastrostudent. We are taking the hard work out of good food for students all across the UK providing meals that are both healthy and good for the planet.

Q and A with Gastrostudent

How did Gastrostudent start?

Gastrostudent was started by former university students, aiming to provide the ultimate convenience in grocery delivery for university students. But, Gastrostudent is about more than just convenience - we're wanting to help promote independence as a student and change the stigma of 'student food'.

What food options do you offer?

We wanted Gastrostudent to be as inclusive as a student food community as possible, and one glaring gap in the market was for vegetarian options.

We found that the leading recipe box companies didn't offer many vegetarian/vegan meals, and further still, made it difficult to identify these meals.

We wanted everyone to be able to eat the meals that they want to, no matter their food preferences. Unlike the market leaders, we've included a meal filtering tool, so that students can easily find recipes for their preferences. We've still got some way to go- but we're happy that we've made a step in the right direction for food and dietary inclusivity.

What sustainability initiatives have you undertaken in the past?

Recipe boxes are an amazingly convenient way of cooking, especially for students. They're great at reducing food waste, as you only receive the exact ingredients needed for the meals you choose. Recipe boxes, however, aren't great with packaging- and we know that doesn't sit well with students! So we've been proactive in removing as much plastic as possible from our supply chain- using paper and denim insulated cool pouches to keep ingredients cool and fresh during their journey- using sugar cane pulp for our seasoning pots- and include recycling/ non-recyclable labelling on our packaging to promote responsible recycling. We're also passionate about reducing our carbon footprint, so we partnered with JUST ONE Tree, planting one tree for each recipe box sold.

This is the UK's first for a recipe box, and we're proud to be empowering students to make a positive choice when they choose Gastrostudent.

What new causes will you be supporting?

In addition to JUST ONE Tree, we will also be supporting Seven Clean Seas and Mind Out.

Mind Out is a great cause that we have wanted to support for a while. While Seven Clean Seas was more in line with the wants and needs of the customers using our service.

After speaking with our customers in the past, we understood that it was important to remove as much plastic as possible from our supply chain, and with that, the partnership with Seven Clean Seas felt like a natural fit. Our customers have expressed a huge desire to remove plastic from the ocean, and by partnering with Seven Clean Seas, we feel that we can help to make a small change, little by little.

Plastic Offsetting with Seven Clean Seas

What future initiatives do you want to undertake?

We'll always be looking to review our initiatives and ensure that our customers are engaged with making a positive contribution with our partners. Gen Z is often at the forefront of leading change and making a positive impact- so we'll always listen to how they feel we could contribute better to the wider community.

How are we fundraising?

Gastrostudent gives from every product sale with Virtue. After every purchase on our online store customers will have the option of selecting where the donated funds will go to. In addition, customers can also choose to add an additional donation to the cause of their choice.

How to Get Involved?

For Students

If you are a student (or not) and are looking to take advantage of these great meals you can find them on our site or you can reach out to us directly on our instagram.

To see the great work being done at Virtue Impact, head to their website and check out how they're looking to have a positive impact on the customer experience for e-commerce businesses.