How digital design helps restaurants be more sustainable
In honor of Earth Day this past month, we’re highlighting ways digital design can help restaurants be more sustainable! We’re lucky to work with numerous restaurants that implement sustainability practices, but people might not realize how much design affects their sustainability efforts. Utilizing digital design reduces in-house waste, but it’s essential to understand how big of an impact website carbon emissions can have on sustainability. We’ll walk through some of the ways that digital design makes restaurants more eco-friendly, and ways to improve sustainability efforts by reducing website carbon emissions.
In-house:
There are multiple ways that digital design can reduce in-house waste. The biggest when it comes to food establishments is removing the need for physical menus. Digital design allows menus to be housed fully online, and accessible through QR codes. This also allows the restaurants to update their menu as often as they want without needing to print new menus each time there is a menu change. At Bento Box, all of our clients get their menu recreated on their website and we offer the option to provide digital assets like dine-in QR tabletop signage and social media graphics.
Another huge source of waste in restaurants is something we never really think about: receipts. 1.5 billion pounds of paper is generated by receipts alone! Adopting “pay-at-table” or QR code payment methods is a great solution to this problem since the paper receipt will only be generated if requested which, in most cases, is unnecessary. This solution not only is great for the environment but also increases table turnover which will automatically bring more revenue to the restaurant.
Website:
Restaurants can actually reduce their carbon footprint through their website! While being fully online seems like it would automatically be eco-friendly, websites can negatively affect the environment due to the high amount of electricity usage. The first step is checking where the site is hosted. Using an eco-friendly, or “green,” hosting provider is an easy way to largely reduce the carbon footprint of a website due to how much energy the hosting data centers consume. Picking a host committed to sustainability will ensure a website isn’t contributing to a data center with a massive carbon footprint. “Green” hosting providers can be found by looking through The Green Web Foundation directory.
Optimizing site performance will reduce a website’s carbon footprint by requiring less energy to load for each user accessing the site. Reducing the amount of code used on a site will speed up site performance and use less energy. Using a no-code template can be easier for non-technical users, but it requires the site to be fully loaded with a lot of unnecessary code! With BentoBox’s optimized platform, each site only has the code needed for that design.
One of the easiest fixes for a slow-loading site is the media it contains. Restaurants want to feature beautiful imagery showcasing their food and drinks, but if they’re not careful these images and videos can slow down the site and require more energy to load. At BentoBox, we choose optimal file types for page speed and upload media at the sizes needed (versus much larger), which helps the site load faster and use less energy. Our platform auto-compresses images to a standard size, which avoids accidentally loading the site up with unnecessarily large images. Optimizing site performance is a win-win for restaurants because it decreases their carbon footprint while improving the user experience. If you’d like to test your websites carbon footprint, we found a great tool to get you started.
At BentoBox, we design beautiful websites that can contribute to our client’s sustainability efforts as well! Check out our recent blog highlighting some of our sustainable customers and learn how to better showcase sustainability efforts.
Written by: Isabella Ambrosio, Web Designer and Chelsea Davis, Junior Web Designer
