Author: Adityan G Bharati, Kaisa Schmidt-Thome, Oriane Ollivier
What can you do everyday to impact positively the climate? - Eat Climate Meals!
Restaurants are aware and interested in offering more climate friendly meals. Climate Meals is a label that guarantees a below than average climate impact of a meal. It is targeted at SME’s by providing tools to measure emissions of meals and advertise the more eco-friendly one.
Becoming climate-friendly is easier for bigger restaurants and restaurant chains who have, e.g. their own carbon footprint tracking systems, programs and possibilities to affect the whole supply chain. Small and medium sized enterprises often lack resources and know-how to become climate friendly. The Climate Meal label is targeted especially for SMEs.
SMEs are provided with expertise, support and tools to plan, advertise and offer climate friendly meals in their menu. In addition, customers are interested in consuming climate-friendly options. People are eating out more and consuming food-delivery services, thusrestaurants are a practical tool to affect customers’ choices, especially in cities. The recognisable Climate Meal label provides customers with information about climate-friendly choices and an easy way to lower their own carbon footprint.
Challenges adressed on the project
Food is a central part of our everyday lives. There is already a large amount of data available on the food’s climate-effects and, with this data, a huge possibility to steer behaviour of both food service providers and consumers towards climate-neutrality. Climate Meal label is a way to support SMEs’ own capacities to affect that part of their production chain where it is easiest to achieve impact without large resources. It is building on existing expertise and resources. The participating restaurants were provided with carbon footprint calculators and support in using them.
Support was provided for communicating their commitment to customers (communication toolkit and using the existing Climate Meal brand on the menu). The campaign gave restaurants an opportunity to experiment with carbon footprint calculators as part of their operations and challenged them to make changes to the menus. Restaurants can continue using the label after the campaign.
Learnings
Main positive lessons
- The consumption of vegetarian food in the partnering restaurants grew higher during the campaign when the meals were introduced as Climate Meals.
- It was important that restaurants had a clear interest in developing their own processes.
- Climate Meal label provides a tool for their internal development.The campaign was a good format since it raised discussion.
- The choice of menu ingredients is a concrete way to empower restaurant staff to realize how easy it is to make climate friendly choices simply by altering the menu ingredients.
Main barriers found
- Covid situation set limitations for restaurants.
- Restaurants vary in their size and tools should be tailored for different sizes of restaurants. Tools should be free or at least reasonably priced so that SME’s can afford them. They have to provide clear added market value for the restaurants.
Key enablers
- Political: climate neutrality targets are on the agenda and of interest for both private businesses and their customers. The urgency was recognized and restaurants were looking for support.
- Economic: Society is more and more service oriented and people are eating out. Therefore the development of climate friendly food services is interesting for both customers and restaurants. Providing the Climate Meal brand helps both providers and users of services to align their actions and find each other. Climate friendly options also give commercial value and responsible businesses are considered as attractive for customers. In addition, the campaign helped Clonet Oy to get their OpenCO2.net-based Climate Calculator for meals into the markets and the need for similar services is growing.
- Social: The campaign helped restaurants and their kitchen staff to understand which elements affect the carbon footprint of food. Data available was used to orient people to make climate-friendly choices through the Climate Meal Label.
- Technical: Data of carbon footprint of food was available and calculators ready for use.
key inhibiting factors
- The campaign suffered from Covid-pandemics since many restaurants had to close or cut costs during the campaign. The campaign raised interest but some restaurants had to say no due to a lack of resources. In general, SME’s have smaller resources to invest in climate friendly options.
- The campaign was relatively short and therefore some of the restaurants could not take part at such a short notice.