Irish Rugby Head Performance Chef Maurice McGeehan has turned the business of sustainability into an art form
For many companies – including restaurants and hotels – the term ‘sustainability’ has become a must-have label first and foremost and a philosophical goal secondly.
In the case of Irish Rugby Head Performance Chef Maurice McGeehan, however, the business of re-using and creating in such a way as to reduce waste and reduce costs has been turned into an art form – and one which has encouraged many others.
From Donegal Roots to Culinary Beginnings
Growing up in the heart of the Donegal Gaeltacht, Maurice was always driven by curiosity, and a drive for cooking that got him to explore other ingredients in search of things that would be more suitable for his palette.
“I was always naturally into cooking at home – very inquisitive, making Asian stir-fries and tasting new flavours when I was very young.
“Something that I seem to have in common with a lot of other chefs is that our maths let us down in my leaving cert, leaving me unable to enter third level education I ended up doing something else. That was certainly how it was for me – The principle at my school knew I was into food, and she had connections at Killybegs catering college.
Finding His Passion at Killybegs Catering College
So, I followed the culinary arts by chance rather than with any kind of plan in mind.” I remember my dad telling me it will be a good thing to do until you can figure things out for myself. Dad brought me to the interview, but it didn’t go too well. Probably because of my lack of professional knowledge and the absence of any real experience. Like a twist of fate, my dad knew one of the hospitality lectures and got talking to some of the chef lecturers while he was there and a couple of days later, I was in class for the first year of my professional cookery cert at Killybegs Catering College.
Maurice took to the culinary arts like a duck to water.
“I soon found that I really liked it,” says Maurice, “and I started becoming one of the strongest in my class and then one of the strongest in the year… then I was getting selected to go over to Italy and set up an Irish restaurant in Sicily as part of a student exchange programme. And then when I graduated, I was in the top 15 out of 120 students.”
Global Experience and Lessons from London and Brazil
His first real work experience in a hotel in Ireland was in Sweeney’s Hotel in Dungloe, Donegal, a short period followed by his first “proper” placement at the Óstán Ghaoth Dobhair. It was there that he learned how to work with large numbers of people; an experience that was backed up in Jury’s Hotel in Ballsbridge in 1998.
His involvement with Gaelic Football then led to a move to London, where he was to spend the next decade and where one of his employers was Computer Associates. It was big corporate posting and the food, he says, was of “Michelin-star level”.
The global experience that a city like London offers led him to explore other national and regional cuisines and the overriding lesson, he says, was the lesson in how simplification usually produced the best and most time-honoured dishes.
By 2011, it was time to move out of London. With little happening in a recession-hit Ireland, he and his wife moved to her home country of Brazil.
“We were doing well, but it was very hard work,” he recalls. “My wife was front-of-house in the bar and restaurant… But we realised when our first child Patrick was coming, that we couldn’t sustain this, so we decided to move back to Ireland.
Pioneering Sustainable Practices at Airbnb
“I was looking for somewhere that would fit my food ethos and my wife spotted an advert looking for an Artisan chef. I said, not sure what that is but ‘yeah, put me down for that’!”
The long interview process took him through 13 interviews before he became chef for American short-stay holiday rental company Airbnb.
“Just achieving that position was massive motivation for me,” says Maurice. ” I got a blank canvas and it was exciting to be going off to the United States and setting things up.”
After helping open the food programme in Portland, Oregon, and spending time in San Francisco getting involved in the essence of what they were doing there, Maurice returned to Ireland to set up his own, sustainability-led multicultural food programme in Dublin“.”
They ended up being recognised as having the best Food Programme globally in Airbnb. It was a great challenge, with 56 different nationalities and many of them coming from nations with strong culinary traditions, such as France and Italy. We need to get the food right and authentic to evoke a sense of home for all the many different nationalities in the office. We made it extra special for them by doing regional cuisines with in countries rather than just doing the countries national dishes which built strong connection between the food team and the office staff.
“It was a great achievement and the satisfactory rates in the office for the food were very high… once we could see where we were going, the next question was, ‘how can we enhance our service?’”
One of the areas where they could see room for improvement and enhancement was in the area of sustainability. Maurice and his team gradually introduced systems of re-using all their fresh food waste, beginning with fruit consumption. The set-up went from strength to strength.
Leading Performance Nutrition and Zero Waste at Irish Rugby
After working with Airbnb for 5 years, the reputation of Maurice and his team had spread to those in charge at the Irish Rugby Football Union.
“The IRFU were exploring what an in-house performance catering model might looked like, compared to a contracting model for and what the benefits would be,” says Maurice, who is now their Head Performance Chef.
Building a food programme on the pillars of nutrition and sustainability, his tenure has been a great success, mirroring the achievements of the national rugby squad on the field.
“To achieve zero waste is extremely difficult,” says Maurice, who nevertheless does far better than most in working towards that difficult goal In regard to having absolutely nothing go into your kitchen bins or having any plate waste over a consecutive period of time. “I did successfully manage to have absolutely no waste in my building for 5 days. That was a couple of years ago and it was a hard thing to do.
“It’s a very funny thing because it relies on a number of factors – such as what the appetite of the people was like, what bi products can be used, what can be blast chilled and reconstituted into a different dish the following day. I am also relying on my portion control and have everything ate. the weather can also influence appetite… another factor that has to be considered is the intensity and timing due to the players training schedule. as this can have an impact on their appetite and the volumes required to meet their demands”.
This can be achieved a day here and there but to achieve it 5 days in a row was a big win, you really have to celebrate those moments because it’s like winning the Lotto, it’s extremely hard to get that again, but I am always close to it.
Reducing waste to near-zero levels requires the co-operation of those eating the food; for them to not leave any food behind, for example. On the packaging side of things, all the cardboard and plastic used in packaging food sent to them needs to be washed and returned to be refilled – something that Maurice has done while he was at Airbnb.
Educating and Inspiring a Sustainable Future
“I think that it’s at home we really need to start. There’s so much food waste happening in all the households in Ireland combined, compared to restaurants and hotels,” he says. “So, if you’re looking at someone making dinner and there’s a bit of a lemon and a bit of a rind of parmesan and a bit of skin, you look at it and say, ‘What am I going to do with that? That’s only a little bit of stuff’ and you throw it in the bin.
“If you had space in the freezer – and I know that you might not often have that space – you should put it in there and let it build up. You could get an empty jam-jar or olive-oil jar. Put it in and immerse it in oil. Then you can use it in soups and suchlike later on.”
Rather than putting such organic waste material into the compost bin, Maurice goes the extra mile and re-uses all of it by either pickling it in oil to make extraordinary flavour-deep salad dressings or converting them to fine powder for homemade flavourings.
“I give talks on this and for many other kitchens, it has opened up how they look at waste trimmings. I get stories coming back of all kinds of flavourings from powders and oils that people are using now in their kitchens.”
In being able to offer the range of food that he does while minimising waste, his Robot-Coupe equipment is an invaluable tool. Maurice is Brand Ambassador for Robot-Coupe Ireland and he works closely with David Coyne of the French-made food processors that have been (literally) at the cutting edge of their game for over 60 years.
David advocates the use of the Robot Coupe machines for all powders produced, particularly the game-changing BI kitchen blenders. The J80 juicer, he says, not only aids in hydration but the waste pulp has a number of uses.
Maurice firmly believes that there needs to be such a shake-up at educational level in terms of opening peoples’ eyes to the possibilities of sustainability.
“I think that a module needs to be introduced on sustainability and how to reduce food waste in the kitchen,” says Maurice, who points out that his kind of regime is highly sustainable from a waste point of view, from a green point of view and from a financial perspective.
“The more you save and use, the less you have to buy in, but you’re also creating exciting new ingredients for menus.”
Maurice makes breads using recycled material that would otherwise have been disposed of as food waste – and that includes making bread from bread. Such as kale stalk, spinach stalk, cauliflower stem powders made possible by the Robot Coupe BL3 to get those fibrous dehydrated stalks & stems in to fine powders which open them up to some many cooking applications.
Small Steps Toward Big Sustainable Change
When it comes to implementing a good sustainable policy, Maurice says that a lot of places fall down on the mistake of biting off more than they can chew – of taking on too much at once and then not being able to sustain their sustainability.
“You need to make small incremental changes,” he says. “Look at your business and see where you want to be in a year’s time and then look at the small steps you need to make in order to get there. Chefs are very strapped for time and the most common feedback I get is ‘I’ve no time for this!’ but if you can re-engineer your menus to make use of the by-products you create, you’ll have that time. You make note of what by-products you’ll have and then you look at where you might be able to use them.”
Seasonality is also very important in this kind of plan. Once again, he points out that buying things out of season is more expensive than looking around to see what is in in season.
“I think that it’s important to show…. It’s no good talking about what you’re doing. You need to just do it and let people see that it works. I see it with chefs; once they see that it’s doable, they’re then inspired to bring it into their kitchens.”
