Regardless of your thoughts concerning the arguments for and against climate change, it’s clear there’s a real political and global will to move away from consuming fossil fuels and finite resources. The Paris Climate Summit revealed that even the actor Arnold Schwarzenegger (former governor of California and one time owner of the Hummer), is an ardent supporter of clean energy.
The hospitality industry stands at a precipice when it comes to sustainability. We are facing issues of food and energy supply security – two products intrinsically linked to food service growth; without food to sell or energy to cook that food there is no sector. As more consumers eat out than ever before, these issues are becoming increasingly compounded amid concerns over packaging and recycling.
There is a major role for the sector to play in driving the solutions to these challenges. The key to this is training at all levels to ensure staff, from management down to kitchen porters, understand the issues and know how to implement best practice guidelines. This starts with setting the right policies, and then engaging staff to feel passionate about tackling sustainability problems. The result is a cascading effect down the business chain.
It doesn’t end with employees. Educating customers is also imperative, and this is possible throughout the dining experience, particularly if you have well-trained front-facing staff. Changing the habits of consumers will drive far greater change than any government legislation ever can. Here, as an industry, we have a huge amount of influence and we need to be wielding it to much greater affect to have a genuine impact.
Some additional items:
We’re well into the festive season and no doubt your hospitality business will be benefiting from the uptick in trade that occurs in our sector this time of year. On the face of it that’s great, but how well is your kitchen coping under the stresses of this additional demand?
Have the usual hygiene and health & safety standards slipped as the pressures of multiple large bookings ramp up? It’s vital to have the robust systems in place to prevent this from happening because the cost of illness traced back to your premises or an accident to an employee due to a failure in risk management could prove very costly.
We produced this blog post a while back, is your hospitality business ready for Christmas? It remains as relevant as ever. Be sure to review the observations and implement the relevant recommendations.
Finally be sure to check out this post about the need for real experiences as part of a business strategy. For a while it seemed as if technology would take over everything but now the real world is fighting back. An example can be seen by Amazon’s launch of their first bookstore in Seattle.
What this highlights is the importance of the experience to consumers when they spend their money. We’ve said it before but that’s absolutely crucial to hospitality operators because it's the experience that will judge whether people return to your location. Remember, achieving repeat custom and advocates is a core driver of growth in your business.
Food for thought...
The content of this post is up to date and relevant as at 11/12/2015.
Please be aware that information provided by this blog is subject to regular legal and regulatory change. We recommend that you do not take any information held within our website or guides (eBooks) as a definitive guide to the law on the relevant matter being discussed. We suggest your course of action should be to seek legal or professional advice where necessary rather than relying on the content supplied by the author(s) of this blog.
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