Last week I attended the UKHospitality Environmental Sustainability Seminar, which was a particularly excellent event, providing a really helpful lens through which to view our sustainability progress as a sector, especially on carbon reduction.

Presenters and panellists alike shared the details of their sustainability planning and execution, almost all of which was highly impressive. Much of the discussion focused on Scope 1 & 2 emissions (which are the more direct emissions that are more in control of the operator), rather than Scope 3 which are indirect emissions within the supply chain. In hospitality this is mostly food and drink.

As conversations at the seminar developed in this area there were many great examples cited of the modification of menus and the provision of carbon labelling to help diners shift to lower carbon dishes. But when questioned about the measurement and management of the ingredients themselves much more cautious language emerged, perhaps summed up by one leading operator who said “its early days in this area.”

And this is hardly surprising. Most farming in the UK relies heavily on man-made herbicides, pesticides, and fertilisers. In recent decades, most fertiliser has been made not from manure or nitrogen fixing crops, but from ammonia produced in energy intense chemical plants. Once spread on the land any fertiliser that isn’t taken up by plants sinks into the soil. From there it is either washed into our rivers and aquafers contaminating both, or converted by bacteria into nitrous oxide a greenhouse gas that is roughly 265 times more potent than Co2. Synthetic fertiliser alone accounts for about 4% of global emissions. Carbon emissions from agriculture and fertiliser manufacturing together represent half of all food emissions in the UK.

So if this practice causes so much harm, why is it still so widespread? The answer lies in the history of our food over the past 50+ years, where because of the fear of population growth creating production shortages, growers have been encouraged by governments to focus only on yield. This obsession with yield has led us into highly intensive production where most farmers focus on one type of crop, with relatively low-cost chemical inputs added to boost yield. So the cost per kilo of the food produced is lower than food produced by more traditional methods, but the cost in terms of environmental damage is higher.

Last week I also attended an event about the food system as a whole, which included representatives from farming, food processing, food manufacturing, food retail, and hospitality sectors. The most common topic of conversation here was regenerative farming. The principles driving this type of production are… not disturbing soil, keeping soil surfaces covered, keeping living roots in the soil, growing a diverse range of crops, and bringing grazing animals back to the land. This process is much more nature friendly, but critically it drastically reduces carbon emissions. The switch to regenerative has been slowly gathering pace in recent years, mainly by individual small producers seeking a more nature friendly way of carrying out their business. What they produce has been more expensive, but many have found routes to local markets where sustainability conscious citizens have been prepared to pay the premium required.

What is happening now is that larger scale farmers are now beginning to invest to create more economic production using the same principles. This has of course been helped by the spike in chemical costs caused by the Ukraine War, where even intensive farmers are now striving to limit their chemical input costs. The cost gap between intensive and regenerative product should therefore continue to narrow in the future.

Pre-Covid when this gap was 10%-20%, many operators dismissed regenerative product as being simply too expensive. But after 18 months of double-digit food inflation the sector now has a good case study about how to manage margins differently.

At Prestige Purchasing we have, in the past year, supported operators in their quest to have a more nature friendly supply chain, with considerable success. Food manufacturing and Food Retail are now investing heavily too as they search for more customers through reputational gain. And in the hospitality sector organisations like Compass and Honest Burgers have been trailblazers with their ambitions within the regenerative space.

I have a long-held view that hospitality has a critical role in driving consumer change. Our interface with the people that walk through our doors is so much more dynamic than it is in retail, where the consumer traipses round the aisles and queues at the checkout, desperate to get home for a sit-down and a cuppa. In hospitality we have the arena in which to educate and inspire our diners, and in the process build our brands and diner loyalty. And we have our people - chefs that teach our consumers about food, and front of house staff who so ably get our diners engaged.

And through this…. we CAN actually lead changes in the whole food system too.