Foodservice Cateys 2024: Chef Award – Jon Lilley, Lexington Catering

As group development chef at contract caterer Lexington, Jon Lilley is responsible for the business’s chef teams, apprentices and suppliers. He is pivotal to overseeing quality standards, driving innovation, and honouring food heritage.

His career in hospitality started a little later than most, as Lilley retrained at the age of 27 after a decade working in insurance. Since then his 19 years at Lexington have been impactful.

With an evident dedication to sustainability, Lilley has spearheaded initiatives to reduce meat consumption, blending pulses and breadcrumbs into dishes to maintain taste and quality while lowering carbon emissions and costs. He has also pioneered Lexington’s Trashed program, which educates chefs on repurposing food scraps such as courgette ends and carrot tops into products such as pesto. Such is his influence that suppliers now send tomato leaves to Lexington for repurposing. These efforts have contributed to a 17% reduction in CO2 per kilogram of food served in 2023.

He also helped launch the Mindful Kitchen forum, which showcased collaborations with multiple organisations to promote meat and carbon-reduced dishes. He was also involved with the Chef’s Manifesto, a project that brought together more than 1,200 chefs from around the world to explore how they can innovate and help deliver a sustainable food system.

He has also implemented the StarChef management system, which consolidates all Lexington recipes into a central database and supports new legislation, such as ingredient reporting and calorie counting, as well as including 4,000 carbon-labelled dishes.

His mentorship has been pivotal in the development of the careers of several chefs, such as Natalie Sheridan, who launched her brand Sift & Bake and appeared on Great British Bake Off: The Professionals. In addition, Lilley led eight team members to success at the Salon Culinaire at the HRC 2024 show, earning multiple awards.

He is a champion of his colleagues talents internally too, having devised and launched Lexington’s Casual Dining Competition, which brings site teams together and requires them to create a food concept and develop marketing, menus, uniforms and a social media campaign. It has grown considerably since its launch and last year nine teams competed in the final in front of 200 clients, consultants and suppliers.

On top of all of this, he has come to the aid of small businesses, such as Caribbean street food brand Belly, by helping founder Tyrone Brown take his work from his kitchen to Lexington clients, and supporting charities such as Future Plate, helping it produce its largest event to date, Rumble in the Jungle, by giving it access to Lexington’s supply chain.

His charitable endeavours don’t stop there, he sacrifices his Christmas day to cook for the families of sick children at Evelina Hospital and supports Genie’s Wish, a charity whose mission is to enhance the lives of people under 40 with life-limiting conditions.

This is a chef with seemingly boundless energy to support those outside his organisation as much as his colleagues within it.

What the judges said

“An incredibly worthy winner. Jon’s entry stood out for his immense support of the wider industry while also developing his people and driving innovation.”

David Steel

See previous winners of the award here