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Restaurateurs forced to more actively confront environmental issues from seafood choices to waste disposal
2nd April 2003
SEAFOOD.COM NEWS
Restaurants once were a harbour from the pressures and problems of the outside world. But the growing list of environmental concerns that affect the foodservice industry has required restaurateurs to address weighty global issues inside their doors.
Such federal standards as the Clean Air Act of 1970 and the Clean Water Act of 1977 set the tone decades ago for national environmental policy, enforced by state and local regulations.
Now, with states scrambling to balance budgets, restaurants may hear the call to fund more environmental measures.
'Municipalities don't have the money to invest in infrastructure' such as sewage-treatment plants, said Steve Grover, National Restaurant Association vice president of health and safety regulatory affairs.
Consequently, the costs to keep grease out or city water resources, to divert waste from landfills and to remove air-polluting particulates increasingly are the onus of private industry.
To preserve their bottom lines, restaurateurs in all corners of the industry are testing the power of 'green' resource management. Their initiatives range from the leading burger chains' unified stance to require more humane animal-welfare practices by their suppliers to moves by coffee retailers to expand their use of products that don't threaten rainforests' bird habitats or the livelihoods of coffee pickers in far-off continents.
Green goals also include efforts as mundane as San Francisco food handlers' collection of kitchen scraps for composting in nearby wine country vineyards.
In many cases, change has occurred because of consumer pressure, although a ballot initiative last November in ecology-minded Berkeley, Calif., tried and failed to force the city's restaurants and coffeehouses to use only coffee beans deemed to be more labour- and earth-friendly.
But deep-pocketed interests, such as Trillium Asset Management, a Boston-based investment firm that promotes a socially responsible agenda, successfully have applied pressure to change industry practices. Trillium and the group People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals is widely credited with prompting members of the National Council of Chain Restaurants and the Food Marketing Institute to draft uniform guidelines two years ago for the animal welfare policies of companies that supply product to the restaurant industry.
Perhaps the most influential environmental group, according to restaurant operators and industry experts, are 18- to 24-year-olds, particularly on college and university campuses. 'Younger people are really forcing this,' claims Jack Spurlock, the director of purchasing for foodservice contractor Bon Appetit Management Co., a Palo Alto, Calif., division of Compass Group.
Still, even restaurateurs who cater to the youth market and have a socially conscious business plan find themselves the target of consumer pressure. Witness the plans that called for a March 25 protest against Seattle-based Starbucks, the coffee-segment leader whose more than 6,200 stores worldwide include about 2,200 licensed branches.
Starbucks uses recycled packaging in its coffeehouses, was one of the first large coffee retailers to market organic and rainforest-friendly varieties of beans and contributes to environmental causes in the communities it serves. But the Organic Consumers Association, a 5-year-old lobbying group with offices in Little Marais, Minn., and San Francisco, wants Starbucks to stop using dairy products that contain the controversial recombinant Bovine Growth Hormone, also known as Bovine Somatropin, which increases milk production in cows. After pressuring Starbucks for two years to cut ties with dairies that use rB GH or rBST, which have raised health concerns for humans, the group decided to picket Starbucks' headquarters during its March shareholders meeting.
Like many consumer activists today, the Organic Consumers Association rallied supporters via the Internet, where the speed of communication can turn a small-town complaint into a worldwide beef.
But for many restaurateurs, a greener business outlook has translated not only into better customer relations but also into healthier sales.
Seattle's Best Coffee, the 221-unit coffee specialist that is a division of Atlanta-based AFC Enterprises Inc., first added one 'Fair Trade' French roast coffee to its product line in 2001, two years after its behemoth neighbour, Starbucks, entered that environmentally correct market. Both used the services of Paul Rice, an Oakland, Calif., entrepreneur whose company, TransFair, sources coffee from small, organic plantations in developing countries.
The Fair Trade movement, which reportedly began in Holland in the late 1980s, supports growers who do not clear cut, slash and burn or chemically fumigate their plantations, maintaining habitat for native birds and protecting the rainforest. According to TransFair literature, those farmers earn a minimum of $ 1.26 per pound, more than twice the net reported rate paid to coffee growers on the open market.
Encouraged by a 30-percent gain in Fair Trade retail coffee sales in 2002, Seattle's Best recently launched two new blends for its 250 college and university wholesale outlets, according to company spokeswoman Carol Rogalski. She declines to state what percent of overall sales resulted from the one Fair Trade blend, but notes that 'because we are growing rapidly, it is a big part of our business. The students were really asking for it.'
In its retail stores, the Fair Trade blend commands a 50-cent premium over other brews, she says, and is one of six organic coffee varieties on the menu. The stores also sell 12-ounce bags of the blend for $ 8.50, about 12 cents less per pound than Starbucks, which offers its Fair Trade product at $ 11.45 per pound.
For its academic outlets, Seattle's Best supplies both whole-bean and ground coffees. 'In addition to bringing on more Fair Trade coffee, [schools] wanted espresso beverages as well,' necessitating whole-bean shipments, Rogaiski explains.
Bon Appetit Management also specializes in campus foodservice, where young academics, such as those at California client Santa Clara University's Environmental Studies Institute, help the company discover environmentally friendly technology. Consequently, Bon Appetit's Spurlock says, the contractor can afford to be green.
The company currently uses several suppliers of compostable serviceware that charge slightly more than traditional vendors of plastic or paper, but Spurlock projects a price drop in the near future, once the new breed of suppliers receives broader distribution. Meanwhile, items such as garbage-can liners, disposable silverlike flatware, plates, clear plastic cups and clamshell containers, all derived from vegetable-starch compounds, break down via composting in less than 100 days, one of Bon Appetit's solid-waste requirements.
'The costs [for compostable products] have come down big time in the last few years,' Spurlock says. 'We want to put the message out that we're empathetic to [students'] needs,' he adds.
Students at SCU's Environmental Studies Institute recently completed research on landfill reduction; Spurlock says his latest fascination is with garbage compactors that 'dehydrate waste, extract the liquid' and grind the residue 'like a pulper. It looks like insulation,' he commented.
According to Michael Alexander, senior research associate at the Washington, D.C.- based National Recycling Coalition, U.S. consumers recycle 30 percent of their solid waste, which, according to the Environmental Protection Agency, totalled 232 million tons in 2000, or 4.5 pounds of solid waste per person per day.
Of that waste, only 1.2 pounds gets recycled, but, according to Alexander, the resulting energy saved is 'enough to meet the energy requirements for 6.5 million homes. Recycling reduces greenhouse gases equivalent to taking 25 million passenger cars off the road for a year.'
The NRC, a 4,500-member nationwide organization that promotes the use of renewable resources, participated in the EPA's U.S. Recycling Economic Information Study in 2002. Alexander said that, while land-fill concerns are growing, 'the environmental impacts in a landfill pale by comparison to resources wasted to make that product in the first place. That's where the environmental benefits of recycling occur.'
Referring to arguments that the American consumer-driven economy creates jobs, Alexander said, 'those [arguments] might come home to roost with the worldwide economy. Europe is moving forcefully ahead in a government-led way [to recycle].’ Additionally, he warned, 'recycling countries won't squander their resources; they'll be exporting products and importing wealth.'
In San Francisco, solid-waste management became a legal issue last September, when the City Council passed legislation to require businesses, residents and visitors to divert at least 75 percent of their garbage from landfills by 2010. To help the city's restaurateurs meet that goal, a conglomeration of disposal companies, called NorCal Waste Systems, collects up to 300 tons of kitchen food scraps daily to deliver to its composting facilities and then sells the compost to vineyards in California's wine country, one hour north of San Francisco.
Frederic Scheer, chief operating officer of Los Angeles-based Biocorp North America, one of the companies that produce compostable flatware and other items, says landfill reduction was what inspired him to develop compostable products 10 years ago. 'Foodservice goes through 60 to 80 billion pieces of disposable cutlery every year. Something we use for maybe 45 minutes spends how much time in a land-fill?' he asks.
'These [compostable] products are already available in Europe because they have less space and so are more conscious of composting,' he observes. 'But the approach of Europeans is completely different [from that in the United States]. There, regulation is applied whether it has an economic basis or not.'
On this side of the Atlantic, municipalities consider the cost, which Scheer claims has dropped dramatically since the 1990s. As an example, he says, compostable flatware that costs $ 60 per thousand 10 years ago now costs less than $ 20, thanks to improved technology. 'Even if people at heart are environmentally friendly, in the end it comes down to cost,' he concludes.
Scheer admits that Biocorp's products, built on a base of American cornstarch, are not heat-resistant, only withstanding temperatures up to 160 degrees Fahrenheit.
Similar products from Santa Barbara, Calif.-based EarthShell, according to company president and chief operating officer Vince Truant, are microwavable, because of the addition of inorganic content, often food-quality limestone. Publicly traded EarthShell got a boost - and doubled its share value - two years ago when Oakbrook, 111.-based McDonald's Corp. purchased 22 million of the company's clamshells, according to Truant.
But delays from EarthShell's manufacturing partner led 11,000-unit McDonald's to suspend the rollout of the product, which reportedly ramped up to only 500 Chicago area restaurants.
Bob Langert, McDonald's senior director of social responsibility, says that 'from our point of view. [the EarthShell clamshell container] is not commercially viable,' but he indicates that the two companies still are working together on products. 'In general, we're maximizing recycled content and source reduction,' Langert says.
While packaging is an economic issue, Langert's main environmental concern. Animal welfare, is not, he emphasizes. 'It's not a cost issue. It's integrated into the business.'
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