PlantEurope’s March members meeting focused on actors from the gastronomy, catering and hotel business. The meeting provided a platform allowing professionals to connect, share insights of their work and current projects and answer related questions.
We were lucky to be joined by a diverse group of attendees, like consultants looking to share their work, researchers looking at impact investment in the food system and educators looking for inspiration.
Topics discussed were benefits and challenges of entirely vegan labeled restaurants and how sustainable food can be advertised without using too many labels. One reason for the need to move away from labels is that labels often only highlight what is not in the food instead of focusing what is in there. It seems to be important to instead win the trust of the actual food inside instead of the label. Another impression is that producers and restaurateurs find the process of certification to be too laborious and time consuming, when it sometimes leads their customers to be confused by too many labels.
Attendees also highlighted the importance of marketing their food and ingredients as healthy. They have had good experience emphasizing the effect the food will have on customers (for example “energizing” vs. “overfilling”). One participant said that he had good experiences working with customers that go running in the morning and then come to their restaurant for a healthy breakfast.
Education was also mentioned as an important measure to take in the gastronomy sector. Audience members shared ideas, like hands-on cooking workshops, living labs and even using major food environments like festivals to introduce people to a sustainable plant-based diet.
The PlantEurope team would like to say thank you to all guest speakers and the participants for joining and engaging.