The Sustainable Restaurant Association has launched its One Planet Plate campaign, asking restaurants to showcase sustainable and ethical eating by devising one dish that uses local sourcing, zero waste, better meat, lower carbon footprint or other environmental or ethical considerations. Hundreds of restaurants are taking part in the scheme.

This report from Foodservice Footprint discusses the need for more sustainable diets, outlines the business case for introducing them and provides a framework to help food service businesses offer sustainable food options.

This Buzzfeed story follows allegations that a Cornell researcher published studies obtained through the scientifically dubious method of ‘p-hacking’.

In this paper, FCRN member Dr Gary Goggins discusses factors that affect how organisations develop sustainable food strategies and sets out opportunities and constraints that apply across a range of organisations.

These are two articles on a new study by researchers at the London School of Economics which showed that people who ordinarily eat meat or fish were 56 percent less likely to order dishes in a separate ‘vegetarian section’ on a menu than those same dishes when mixed with meat and fish dishes.

Swiss company Eaternity has developed a set of tools to aid restaurants and chefs to get insights into the supply-chain of the produce they use and improve their nutritional and environmental impacts. The tools include a series of health and sustainability indicators and labels and a menu design app.

IntoFood is a Norwegian-based organisation which helps food companies to report on sustainability and create greener menu offerings, led by FCRN member Will Nicholson. They have completed a project with ISS, a large catering company, in which they generated new menu information including carbon footprint data for all of the 2000+ recipes in ISS’ menu management system.

This master thesis study from the London School of Economics shows how consumers are 56% less likely to order a plant-based dish when it is labelled vegetarian and categorised in a separate section on menus

This summary has been provided by FCRN member Alessandro Cerutti from the European Commission Joint Research Centre (JRC). Public administrations such as schools, hospitals and other sectors are well aware of the effort required to manage all the stages of the catering service, from menu selection through to waste management. Several strategies hold potential to reduce the environmental impacts throughout these stages, especially in the context of the Green Public Procurement (GPP). Unfortunately, despite the best of intentions, budget constraints are constantly forcing managers to make difficult trade-offs.