The University of Sheffield

State of the art Stainless Steel milk churns

Our Cow Molly is located less than 3 miles from the University main campus and is more than just our local dairy farm. Collaboration over the last 10 years has included research activity and our long-term commitment enabled them to secure funding to build a state of the art milking parlour, helping them to expand supply beyond the University, into the local community. The benefit to the University is that the journey from farm to coffee cup is an exceptionally short one, resulting in reduced delivery emissions and a super fresh high-quality product.

We get through over 430,000 pints of milk a year across our University cafes, bars, and stores. This unfortunately generates a large amount of single use plastic waste, we wanted to change this. Working as part of the University delivery group aiming for net zero along with our Sheffield based dairy farm, we funded, sourced, developed, and installed state of the art milk churns, milk shot dispensers and refrigeration units in 3 of our busiest cafes. This reduced the annual amount of single use plastic waste by 27,000 bottles.

This is just the first step of our project, which aims to install these milk churns across the rest of our venues, in turn reducing the single use plastic waste by a massive 87,000 milk bottles per year.

Top 3 Learnings

1. There is always a solution, you just have to look for it.
2. Teamwork is key, everyone has their own strengths to bring to the table.
3. Change doesn’t have to be difficult.