Douglas McMaster

Douglas McMaster is a pioneering chef and food waste activist who founded Silo, the world's first zero-waste restaurant. Trained in Michelin-starred kitchens including ST. JOHN under Fergus Henderson and Noma in Copenhagen, he launched Silo in Brighton in 2014 at just 26, later relocating it to London. His achievements include BBC Young Chef of the Year, Britain's Most Innovative Chef, and a 2026 GEMA Award for social responsibility, earned through his feature in Discovery's Change Drivers series. Douglas equips audiences with practical strategies to eliminate waste, redesign food systems, and inspire environmental action across their organisations.

At just 26 years old, Douglas McMaster opened Silo in Brighton in 2014, creating the world's first zero-waste restaurant and fundamentally challenging how the hospitality industry thinks about food, packaging, and sustainability. Trained under Fergus Henderson at the iconic ST. JOHN in London, and having staged at The Fat Duck and the two Michelin-starred Noma in Copenhagen, Douglas combined fine dining excellence with an uncompromising environmental philosophy. His 2011 pop-up series 'Wasted' in Sydney and Melbourne proved that zero-waste cooking could deliver exceptional culinary experiences, crafting exquisite dishes from ingredients typically destined for the bin. In 2019, he relocated Silo to London's White Building, partnering with CRATE Brewery to expand his vision and demonstrate that sustainable dining could thrive at scale.

Douglas's approach extends far beyond eliminating bins from his kitchen. At Silo, he redesigned every system from the ground up, receiving produce packaging-free, milling flour on-site, and using compost machines to transform kitchen scraps into nutrient-rich compost. His work has earned widespread recognition, including the BBC Young Chef of the Year Award in 2014, Britain's Most Innovative Chef at the inaugural Young British Foodie awards, and the Observer Food Monthly Award for Britain's Most Ethical Restaurant. In 2018, Silo secured Britain's Most Innovative Restaurant at the Craft Guild of Chefs Awards. Most recently, Douglas's impact reached global audiences when he featured in Discovery's Change Drivers series, an episode that won the Gold Social Responsibility Award at the 2026 GEMA Awards Europe. The documentary showcased his philosophy that if nature wastes nothing, neither should we, and demonstrated how bold thinking can reshape entire industries.

Douglas equips audiences with practical frameworks for eliminating waste and redesigning systems within their own organisations. He translates complex sustainability challenges into actionable strategies, showing leaders how to question accepted norms and implement meaningful environmental change. Through real-world examples from Silo's operations, from fermentation techniques to full-system redesign, he demonstrates that zero-waste principles apply across sectors, not just hospitality. Audiences leave with concrete tools to challenge wasteful practices, inspire teams around environmental responsibility, and prove that commercial success and ecological integrity can work hand in hand. His message resonates because it combines technical expertise with genuine passion, offering organisations a roadmap for making sustainability central to their operations rather than an afterthought.