At this year’s Wimbledon Championships, the world’s top tennis players are being fuelled by an unlikely combination of high-performance nutrition and environmental innovation – with sushi emerging as the undisputed favourite at almost every hour of the day.
Behind the polished lawns of SW19, chefs say demand for Japanese-style dishes has become so intense that a dedicated team of sushi specialists now works on site from the early hours to keep up with orders.
One senior member of the catering team said: ‘We can’t make enough of it, they absolutely love it. We have a full-time team of on-site sushi chefs and they are producing from the very early hours of the morning. Sushi is available all times of the day.’
Far from being a novelty, breakfast sushi has become routine for elite athletes who are increasingly tailoring diets around performance, recovery and gut health.
Another staff member added that despite the bespoke nature of the service, players are far from demanding. ‘We don’t have a few players asking me for crazy things every day. They just pile their plates up with what’s on offer.’
That ‘what’s on offer’ is increasingly shaped by sustainability. Venison, for example, has replaced beef across much of the site as part of a wider shift towards lower-carbon protein sources.
According to head chef Bryn Williams, the change is both environmental and nutritional. ‘We swapped our beef for venison in a lot of spaces a few years ago. Venison is fundamentally a more sustainable meat, with a lower carbon weighting. There is an abundance of venison in this country,’ he said.
He added that the meat is lean, protein-rich and sourced from wild deer culled in London’s royal parks, making it a natural fit for elite sport nutrition.
Behind the polished lawns of SW19, chefs say demand for Japanese-style dishes has become so intense that a dedicated team of sushi specialists now works on site from the early hours to keep up with orders
Food demonstrations during the Sustainability Breakfast in Suite 1, No.1 Court, at The Championships 2026
Other ingredients now feature heavily in menus designed around sustainability and performance, including British-grown quinoa and chia seeds, lemongrass cultivated in north Wales, and chalk-stream trout from Hampshire – which has replaced salmon entirely on environmental grounds.
The trout is used in sushi favourites such as California rolls and nigiri, which remain the most requested dishes among players.
‘Sushi is always popular with the players, it’s number one across the board,’ said one chef. ‘We can’t make enough of it.’
Even drinks have been reimagined with sustainability in mind. A new coffee-based kombucha is brewed using discarded grounds collected across the site, transforming waste into a low-caffeine, probiotic-rich drink.
‘We take the coffee grinds from that each day and we brew that into a fresh kombucha,’ said Williams. ‘You’re giving a second life to that product. It’s a really great breakfast start that also has loads of good gut benefit.’
The focus on gut health reflects a wider trend in elite sport, with athletes increasingly adopting fibre-rich, fermented and plant-based foods believed to support the microbiome and improve performance.
Still, tradition has not been forgotten. Around 2.8 million strawberries are served each year at Wimbledon, with surplus fruit turned into jam and sauces for dishes such as chicken karahi.
Yet for many players, the priority remains simple: fuel for the long grind of championship tennis. As one chef put it: ‘You will see slightly weird things, like someone will have pasta with cake on top.’
