Four things we’ve learned about food sustainability
This month we attended the Sustainability 101 session organised by the SRA, the Sustainable Restaurant Association. As the guiding organisation for professional catering, the SRA is where restaurants make sense of what being sustainable means for their businesses.
The session started with a question to the audience: how do you define sustainability? A quick vox populi shows that sustainability has as many meanings as the number of individuals sitting in the room. This might sound like a paradox for a talk dedicated to sustainability but it is the hard truth. Being a sustainable business means different things for different organisations, each with varying priorities and approaches.
That’s why the starting point for any business should be identifying what sustainability means for them. Is it about the environment and joining the fight against climate change? Or being fair to staff and paying the living wage? Once that is agreed internally, a business can take action towards achieving their unique sustainability goals and weave them into their messages to customers.
For Collectiv Food, sustainability is very much about food sourcing. We believe in bringing better food to all, and to do so we are building a new food supply chain driven by quality and sustainability.
With food sourcing our main focus, here are the most interesting learnings we took home from the SRA session:
- The true measure of local and seasonal
How far is local not local anymore? According to the SRA, local food is produced within a 50-mile radius (or 100 miles for London) of the business serving it. The strong emphasis is on the ‘produced’ rather than the ‘supplied’, as we know that wholesalers buy food from farms, transport it to warehouses and re-label it to remove any indication of its provenance. Restaurants have a hard time knowing where their food really comes from and how long it has travelled, which is why Collectiv Food is redesigning the food supply chain to re-connect farmers with chefs.
What about seasonal? In this case it’s all about buying produce in the season in which it is grown. The big caveat here is that importing produce does not count: food is more or less always in season somewhere in the world — but not when put on a UK menu.
Customers do care: 46% of diners say it’s important for restaurants to focus on what is local and seasonal. As a result of this newfound awareness, menus will become more flexible to accommodate changes in ingredients for a ‘soup of the day’ or ‘dish of the day’.
Overall, buying local and seasonal products is a great way for restaurants to support the local community’s economy, reduce emissions, improve freshness and nutritional value — and get better food prices in the process.
2. Deforestation is not only about palm oil
Few people know that soya is responsible for losing 480,000 hectares of tropical forests per year, making it the biggest cause of deforestation today.
Soya is readily associated with food such as tofu, tempeh or non-diary milk but the truth is that the vast majority of it is cultivated for animal feed. 70% of global soya crops are fed to pork, poultry and dairy cows, and only 6% is turned into human food.
Because it’s embedded in so much of the food we eat, it is important that restaurants serving meat and dairy dishes are conscious of soya sourcing.
This is not an easy task as, unlike palm oil certifications, there is no clear labelling for ‘deforestation-free soya’. WWF and other NGOs are working on defining what that means and are due to release better guidance towards the end of 2019.
In the meantime, sustainable restaurants can make a difference by questioning their suppliers on the kind of animal feed used in the meat supply chain.
Direct sourcing from farms is again the best way to get access to this kind of information as it guarantees transparency and traceability.
3. Farmed fish can be more sustainable than wild fish
90% of the world’s fish stocks are now fully exploited or overexploited.
One critical example is sea bass. Since the 1980s we have over-consumed this fish to the point of making it endangered. In 2017 scientists rang the alarm bells and advised zero catch of this fish to allow time to recover.
As of today, farmed sea bass is a more sustainable alternative, in particular organically farmed sea bass from Wales, line-caught black bream, porgy or seabream, or ASC-Certified pangasius (often sold as ‘basa’), as advised by the Sustainable Fish Cities website.
Other species to watch are European eels, which are more endangered than snow leopards according to the Marine Conservation Society, and wild Atlantic halibut, for which the farmed version or the related Pacific halibut species make more sustainable alternatives.
An essential tool for restaurants is the Good Fish Guide published by the Marine Conservation Society. This online resource lists which fish choices get the green light and which should be given a miss on restaurant menus.
4. The second best solution to food waste
The number one solution to food waste is not generating any.
As Silo brings its ‘pre-industrial food system’ concept from Brighton to London this autumn, we can expect the zero waste philosophy to gain momentum in the restaurant scene. But zero waste is not always available, so what else can be done? Anaerobic digestion (AD) is the next best option.
AD is the process of breaking down organic material through micro-organisms in the absence of oxygen and is recognised as the most environmentally sustainable solution to recycling food waste.
The process produces two bioproducts: renewable energy in the form of biogas which can be used for heating and electricity; and a nutrient-rich fertiliser called digestate, which is given to farms to replenish the soil, hence closing the loop of food production.
Currently, only 12% of food waste from restaurants is passed on to one of the three AD plants around the capital, ReFood in Dagenham, Bio Collectors in Mitcham and Cattlegate Farm in Enfield.
AD could divert as much as 160,000 tonnes away from landfill. A typical restaurant in London could save between £150-£1,700 on waste collection costs, equal to a cumulative £9M in savings for all restaurants across the capital.
It sounds like a no-brainer, and it is. Restaurants can start by asking their waste management contractor how much of their waste goes to landfill, is recycled or goes to AD, and take action from there.
A common thread of these learnings is that the public is a big driver for sustainability actions. Also, being sustainable can go hand in hand with commercial profitability.
Any initiative towards sustainability should be communicated to your customers, no matter how small the action is. We want to contribute to building a new culture where we all do our bit for sustainability, whatever that might mean to you and your team.
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