This is what students eat – at least, according to Spar

Students of the Erasmus Sustainability Hub are seeking to establish a database of the best-selling products at Spar’s on-campus supermarket and to provide environment-friendly alternatives to these products. In order to set up the database, they asked the on-campus supermarket what its best-selling products were. It turned out that Spar’s top-12 is full of greasy snacks involving puff pastry.

No one who has ever visited the supermarket will be surprised to learn that coffee is its best-selling product. The entrance to the shop is always blocked by addicts needing their caffeine fix.

The second-best-selling product is actually a reasonably healthy snack: the banana. But once the coffee and the bananas are out of the way, EUR students gorge themselves on puff pastry, chocolate, grease and sausages. The culprits, you may ask? Chocolate rolls, sausage rolls and cheese croissants (yes, EM’s editors helped contribute to this high ranking). The snack traditionally associated with Hogeschool Rotterdam students, a slightly dry-ish frikandel on a bed of oily and soggy puff pastry, covered by another layer of greasy, but slightly crispier puff pastry, could only manage rank 6. Ranks 7, 8 and 9 were all claimed by archetypal French breakfast foods: the ham-and-cheese croissant, the ‘creamy butter croissant 75 g’ and the creamy butter croissant weighing 75 grams. No, EM’s editors are not entirely certain about the difference between ranks 8 and 9, either.

Rounding out the top-12 were apples and two typical student drinks: energy drinks and small bottles of mineral water.

Survey

So, are you one of those people who wish to do something good for Mother Nature and start using products that may be equally bad for you, but better for the environment? If so, be informed that the Sustainability Hub is going to try and find alternatives to these products that are every bit as delicious, but require less packaging or less energy to produce. If you wish to help the Hub out, please complete the survey below. The students running the Hub hope to be able to present their ‘Food database’ before summer. Who knows, it might be just in time to help you realise the #fitbody you will need for your summer pics.