Served. by Kanpla

Technology in hospitality is ten times better than it was two years ago. Satisfaction with it has barely moved.

Chris Fletcher, founder and CEO of Tech On Toast, has the numbers. His study of over 150 hospitality leaders, run with Bill's, Rosa's Thai and technology partner Square, found that 94% only adopt technology when it becomes absolutely necessary. Just 6% buy ahead of the curve. More than half are dissatisfied, and only 18% would recommend their current system to anyone else.

Toby Bonnett sat down with him to work out why. After 25 years in operations across Whitbread, Hard Rock Cafe, Carluccio's and Compass Group, Chris thinks the problem sits somewhere other than the technology.

School meal funding has always been tight in the UK, but in England it has now fallen badly behind. At £2.61 per child, per day, it lags Wales by 79p, Scotland by 69p, and Northern Ireland by 49p. The actual cost of delivering a quality school meal, according to a recent industry report, is £3.45 and climbing.

In this Served. panel talk, we sat down with two experts who work both the kitchen and the campaign trail: Luke Consiglio, CEO of The Pantry UK Ltd and a director on the national board of The School Food People, and Bryan Lygate, Chief Operating Officer of Impact Food Group (which feeds over 1,700 schools and colleges across England) and vice chair of The School Food People.

Why food waste is designed into menus, planning, and leadership decisions.

Food waste in contract catering doesn’t start in the kitchen. It starts with decisions made long before service.
Menus are planned. Volumes are padded. Safety margins become the norm. The result is one of the most expensive and persistent problems in foodservice.

Each year, around 1.05 billion tonnes of food, nearly 20% of global production, is wasted (source: link). In European contract catering, foodservice operators have already achieved roughly 25% waste reduction, proving that food waste is not inevitable, but a result of how systems are designed (source: link).

In this episode of Served., Peter Baech, CEO and Co-founder of Kanpla, is joined by Vojtech Vegh, Anti-Food Waste Chef, Author, Speaker, Zero-Waste Plant-Based Chef at Surplus Food Studio, and Zero-Waste Culinary Advisor at Winnow.

Drawing on more than 15 years of experience across professional kitchens and multi-site contract catering, Vojtech explains why food waste is rarely an operational failure. It’s a leadership decision.

2025 didn’t just pass - it exposed the fault lines in contract catering.
Some operators moved forward. Others stood still. And a few quietly fell behind.
As 2026 begins, the gap between front-runners and everyone else is widening - driven by data & AI, consolidation, experience design, and a growing demand for transparency.
To understand what really changed in 2025 - and what will actually matter in 2026 - we brought together three leaders with a front-row seat to the industry:
Peter Baech, Co-founder and CEO, Kanpla
Simon Elliot, Co-founder and Managing Partner, 4xi Global Consulting
Chris Stern, Founder & Managing Director, Stern Consultancy Ltd
Hosted by Toby Bonnett, the conversation cuts through the noise to examine what actually shifted in 2025 - and what will separate the front-runners from the rest in 2026.

When Sodexo left Denmark during the pandemic, Christian Lunner faced a choice: walk away or build something new. In this Served. Founder Story, the CEO and Partner at SERWIZ shares how a management buy-out became one of Denmark’s fastest-growing FM and catering companies.