Interview with Customer Success Manager, Chris Swain: Embedding Sustainability in Chef Teams Across an International Hotel Group

‍What was the primary goal behind Foodsteps partnering with Raffles and Fairmont on the sustainability workshop initiative?

At the end of 2024 Accor launched their Good Food Policy, which sets out 7 key commitments to be achieved by 2030.

One of these commitments is to offer hotel guests low-carbon dishes. Through the Foodsteps platform, Accor can measure and reduce the carbon footprint of food menus across over 300 hotels. Beyond granting the hotel teams access to our platform, we wanted to engage the chefs in their learning journeys. Participating in sustainability workshops not only gave chefs access to the right tools, but empowered them to build low-carbon menus confidently.

Food & beverage makes up 17% of Accor’s carbon footprint, 50% of its water footprint and 80% of its land footprint, so tackling these impacts is a key part of their overall Net Zero strategy.

“Foodsteps has been a great partner to us. Their flexibility in adapting to our brand’s unique needs, combined with their hands-on support for our hotel teams, has been invaluable. More importantly, the workshops have created a clear link for our teams between what happens in their kitchens, the associated impact, and our broader targets – helping them understand their role in the bigger picture.” - Marina Elsener, Global Executive Director of Sustainability, Raffles & Fairmont

‍What does a typical sustainability workshop for the chefs involve, and what are the key takeaways you aim for?

We collaborated with Fairmont and Raffles’ Sustainability and Food & Beverage teams to build a series of workshops focusing on two topics: decarbonising menus and decarbonising sales. This is a logical progression that starts by focusing on how to get more low-carbon food on menus, and then explores how to best nudge your customers towards those dishes.  

A workshop focusing on menu decarbonisation will involve taking an ingredient that is typically high in GHG impact – for example ruminant meat or dairy – diving into the science behind why that ingredient is high impact, and then exploring what alternative ingredients exist and the techniques to implement them.

An example of a technique that works really well as an entry point is blending. This involves taking a meat-based dish, usually one that contains minced meat, removing some of the meat and replacing it with plant ingredients, such as mushrooms or lentils. This reduces the GHG emissions and adds in plant diversity and the associated health benefits. It also enhances the flavour of the dish with umami from ingredients like mushrooms.

‍Can you share a specific example of how a chef's approach to sustainability changed as a direct result of attending one of these workshops?

A topic that’s often an eye-opener for chefs is food miles. There’s a common misconception that the carbon impact of food is largely driven by transport emissions and how far the food has travelled. This typically isn’t the case unless the food has been air freighted – and less than 1% of food miles are from air. 

What’s much more important is the choice of ingredient, how it’s farmed and seasonality. Rather than focusing on switching to locally sourced ingredients, we encourage focusing on reducing the use of high impact ingredients, as well as thinking about where those high impact ingredients are being sourced and the farming techniques of the supplier.

Sourcing local food supports local farmers and builds strong relationships with local suppliers, but is unlikely to significantly reduce a menu's carbon impact on its own.

‍What challenges have the chefs faced in embedding new sustainability practices, and how have the workshops helped them overcome these?

We put the first part of this question to chefs in our very first workshop to ensure we were tailoring the content to those challenges. The main themes that came up were:

• Managing and influencing the expectations and preferences of guests at luxury hotels
• Availability and cost of alternative ingredients
• Lack of knowledge/training
• Challenges with themed restaurants, for example a steak restaurant

Armed with the knowledge of these challenges, we built additional content into the workshops that addressed them. To address the issue of influencing guests' meal choices, we looked at how the language used to describe plant-rich dishes can dramatically alter sales. We encouraged using language that focuses on the taste, health and provenance of the dish, rather than language that highlights the absence of something, like ‘meat-free’, or the use of exclusionary labels like Vegan. For example, Spicy Bean Chilli Protein Bowl is much more likely to entice a non-vegan than Vegan Chilli sin Carne.

‍In your experience, how has fostering a community accelerated or improved the adoption of sustainable techniques?

Fostering a sense of community has been really important, especially due to the global and online nature of this initiative. One of the ways we built community into the workshops was by inviting hotel teams to showcase their work. After uploading menus from their chosen restaurant, hotels were challenged to create an Action Plan demonstrating how they would reduce the carbon impact of their menus. We invited hotels to present these action plans, which led to some lively questions and discussion with their peers. It also creates a sense of healthy competition and pushing each other forwards.

‍What key steps should a business take to ensure a sustainability partnership is set up for success from day one?

The most important first step is to provide context – why should the operators in the business care about implementing these changes? Then, tie this ‘why’ back to tangible company goals and KPIs. Even better if this can be built into their bonus structure, to really incentivise uptake. 

This process of contextualisation creates the link between the sustainability workshops and the company's goals. For example, Accor has a target to reduce scope 3 emissions by 28% by 2030 from a 2019 base year. In the workshops, we connect the dots between how reducing the GHG impact of dishes served at the hotel and nudging more customers towards those low impact dishes actively contributes to this goal by reducing the footprint of the hotel’s food procurement over time.

Finally, it’s important to identify strong internal advocates for sustainability from early on, and use them to champion the initiatives. 

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