Food & Drink

The food on our (plastic-free, compostable) plates has far reaching impacts and is such a key element for greening lifestyles and by extension – also events as transformative spaces for human behaviour change.

Here’s the work we’ve been doing to eat as if the future exists (for the past 2 decades)…

We Are Meat & Fish Free

For environmental reasons, we’ve been meat and fish free since 2016 –  to spark the conversation about how our diet shapes the world around us – 80% of deforestation is for agricultural land, and of that land – almost three-quarters is used for livestock farming and growing livestock feed! You can read much more about this here. 

As a result, our food emissions at Shambala are 6% of total emissions, compared with 21% average for UK festivals, and… we also have one of the most exciting, delicious, diverse and healthy menus on the festival circuit!

Food Standards

For many years we have been taking significant steps to understand our food supply chain, to move toward organic and regenerative sourcing. Our community of food stalls willingly work with us to adhere to our strict food policies.

All on-site food traders are required to:

• Use only plant-based milks for hot drinks – see our Gone Off Milk Report here.
• Serve majority UK or European fruit & veg, and only Fairtrade bananas.
• Use organic eggs.
• Only serve Fairtrade (or equivalent) tea, coffee, hot chocolate and drinks.
• Agree to not serve any Coca-Cola or Nestle products on site.
• Only use non-toxic, biodegradable cleaning products.

Food Impact Labelling

We have been experimenting with food labelling since 2018, to create an evidence based and shared awareness around food impacts. Our quest is to move toward ‘one planet plates’ – low impact and ‘fair/equitable’ meals based on 0.5kg CO2e per meal, a global measure set by WWF research. And we’re nearly there!

Our food traders use Klimato, a food carbon calculator, to assess and display environmental labelling for their dishes – look out for this onsite. This also enables us to work out our total food emissions footprint.

Inspirational Traders

We recognise cafes that achieve the highest standards with our annual ‘Inspirational Trader’ awards. These are folks who are ultra-energy-efficient in their cooking, or doing inspirational things on land and farms they own or work with. See the 2025 winners here.

Raising the Bar: Our Ethical Drinks Offering

In partnership with our friends at Refresh West, our bars are run with strongly held principles ahead of profit margins. We’ve inspired each other, grown together and share the same values around quality, sustainability and sourcing. We were pioneers of the reusable bar cup scheme – which has now been adopted by hundreds of events and venues across the country.

We serve you an amazing array of local, ethical and delicious independent drinks, and stick two fingers up to crappy, corporate flat lager!

• We work with independent breweries 
• 9 out of the 12 beer and cider suppliers are based within 70 miles 
• 62% of the beer on site (and 80% of the sustainable wine) is vegan

In 2026 we’ve been working hard behind the scenes to establish relationships with radical spirit makers, kombucha suppliers, and ground-breaking cocktail makers. Watch this space for some really exciting updates to come shortly!

We have also had zero single use plastics across all our bars for several years.