The Future of Dining: 5 Ways Restaurants Can Enhance Sustainability in their Business
Catering from Le Botaniste at OnePointFive’s New York Climate Week social event.
Did you catch the OnePointFive team at New York Climate Week? If you did, you most likely attended our social Climate Mixer event, where we could connect climate leaders and solutionists in the city, graduates of our OPF Academy, graduates of the Climatebase Fellowship, and the broader climate community. Read more about our team’s key takeaways from the events of the week.
We partnered with Impact Hub New York to co-host attendees in an incredible space, and worked with four food vendors to cater the event: Farm to People, Le Botaniste, Eat the Change, and PLNT Burger. We chose these caterers not just because they serve delicious food, but we intentionally picked businesses that aligned with our own climate and sustainability values. These sustainable food businesses exemplify ways in how restaurants and food vendors as a whole can tackle sustainability—here are some key takeaways from their sustainability missions.
1. Expand the Menu’s Biodiversity
Carrot chews and mushroom jerky from Eat the Change.
Incorporating a diverse array of plants, fungi, and alternative proteins can significantly contribute to a richer biosphere and avoid over-reliance on the few staple crops that represent over half of all global agriculture: corn, rice, wheat, and potatoes. This approach not only promotes biodiversity, but also reduces the environmental impact of agriculture. Eat the Change, for example, offers snacks made from mushrooms and carrots, spotlighting underutilized ingredients and reducing their ecological footprint.
2. Reduce Waste Across the Board
The restaurant industry generates a significant amount of food waste. Implementing changes like opting for water-efficient crops and “imperfect” ingredients that might otherwise go to waste (as Eat the Change does) can mean making significant strides toward a lower waste or zero-waste model. For example, Le Botaniste repurposes beet pulp from making their red beet detox juice to make red beet caviar to minimize food waste within their own kitchens.
Waste reduction in restaurants also extends beyond food. For example, Farm to People avoids products with excessive packaging, and uses recycled or compostable materials to ship delivery orders.
3. Support Local, In-season Produce
Another crucial aspect of sustainable food business is using produce that is local and in-season. For example, Farm to People sources local produce—primarily partnering with farms within a 300-mile radius of NYC—that’s in season and grown using regenerative and sustainable practices. Sourcing locally limits emissions produced from transportation, and using ingredients that are in-season means that less energy is used to actually grow the food. Added benefits include having fresher food, and supporting local economies in the process!
4. Provide Better Transparency with Guides and Certifications
Food vendors and businesses often seek out third party certifications for their ingredients to ensure that what they’re sourcing is ethically grown and produced. Certifications offer a level of transparency to not only the vendor, but to the restaurant’s customers as well. For example, Farm to People uses the Monterey Bay Aquarium Seafood Watch as their guide, only carrying products considered “Best Choice” or “Good Alternative”—additionally, all of their seafood is Marine Stewardship Council-certified.
PLNT Burger, a sister company of Eat the Change, even provides a short description of a Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) by the University of Michigan that compares the emissions for a traditional beef burger to their plant-based burgers.
A quick infographic display by PLNT Burger that cites an LCA conducted by the University of Michigan comparing the environmental impact of beef versus plant-based burgers.
Our experts at OnePointFive can help restaurants improve transparency with LCAs!
5. Reduce GHG Emissions
Catering from Le Botaniste.
Another approach restaurants may take is to pursue certification for their own business entirely. Le Botaniste is certified CO2 neutral, partnering with an agency to calculate GHG emissions. For further transparency, they even share the carbon footprint of every menu item next to the nutrition information.
OnePointFive can help food businesses calculate GHG emissions to drive better sustainability strategies.
By adopting these practices, restaurants can significantly reduce their environmental impact and attract a growing demographic of environmentally conscious consumers, making sustainability a deliciously smart business priority.
