Episode 147: What Defines a 'Good' Restaurant? Inside the SRA's Story and Vision with Juliane Caillouette Noble.

Worldchefs Podcast: World on a Plate

Host Ragnar Fredriksen interviews Juliane Caillotte Noble, CEO of the Sustainable Restaurant Association (SRA), about the evolving definition of

Key takeaways

• The Food Made Good Standard is built on three pillars: sourcing/supply chain, social impact, and operational environmental impact.
• SRA has expanded its reach from a UK-centric focus to implementing frameworks in 49 countries.

Main topics

• The Food Made Good Standard
• SRA mission and global expansion

Notable quotes

If we don't think about the sustainability of the people in our industry, it doesn't really matter the impact that we have on the environment.

Conclusion

The episode demonstrates that true sustainability in restaurants requi

Transcript preview

Speaker 2 (0:00) Welcome to WorldChef's podcast, World on a Plate, a leading voice in hospitality representing a dynamic global network of over 100 chef associations worldwide. WorldChef is committed to empowering culinary professionals for the betterment of the industry and humanity at large. World on a Plate is supported by Nestle Professional and Electrolux Food Foundation. Now, let's dig in. Now, welcome to World Chef Podcast. I'm your host, Ragnar Fredriksen, and this is World on a Plate. I'm very excited to introduce today's guest. It's Juliane Cayouette-Noble. She's the CEO of the Sustainable Restaurant Association, which helps hospitality businesses around the world become more sustainable. Their main tool is the Food Made Good Standard, which we will talk about. A sustainability assessment built around the pillars that we will also discuss, the sourcing, society, and the environment. and now used across more than 15,000 kitchens in 40 countries. So it's quite an expansion. Julianne has also been leading the organization since 2016, driving at expansions across all continents. And before that, she spent five years running Jamie Oliver's programs for the school food and the food education in the UK. So we're looking forward to hear more about how sustainability is shaping the hospitality sector and what it means for... people working in it. So let's get started. And I just want to say, Julianne, thank you so much for joining the podcast. Speaker 1 (1:22) Thank you so much for having me. What a joy to be with you this morning. Speaker 2 (1:26) Yeah, no, it's been great to follow your organization. It's been a tremendous growth. So you've been around since 2009. So what is the mission today of the organization? And what role does it play in the hospitality sector? Speaker 1 (1:40) Brilliant. Well, thank you so much for having me and for having this opportunity to talk more about the work that we do at the Sustainable Restaurant Association. So as you say, the SRA has been around since 2009. We began in London, again, kind of almost. 18 so years ago. And if you were able to rewind your mind back to 2009 and what it was like in the sort of early 2000 period, conversations around sustainability were definitely starting to bubble up. But there wasn't a lot of clarity on what that actually meant or looked like for a hospitality business. And that therefore meant that different businesses were defining that in different ways. You heard... businesses that were sort of a sustainable restaurant because it's the beginning of the farm to table movement. They're focusing on where their ingredients come from. At the same time, you started seeing food service players or big corporates starting to talk about corporate social responsibility. And you started to see a sort of increase in that kind of language, a growth in labeling schemes like Fair Trade Foundation and, you know, some of the phishing marks that are increasingly prevalent in supermarkets around the world. So it was an interesting sort of nascent time for sustainable hospitality. And the SRA was set up to bring together the industry to actually understand what does it mean to be a sustainable restaurant? What are, what is the intersection of all of the different issues that come to bear within our businesses and in our operations? And therefore we kind of created, we were created with the mission to drive the hospitality sector towards a future that is both environmentally restorative. and socially progressive. So those two things come together to really define what we're talking about when we talk about the word sustainability. Yes, we are talking about our environmental impact as a sector. We are talking about the food that we serve, where it comes from, how it gets into our restaurants, the operations of our restaurant, things like energy, water, waste, etc. But this extra piece around what does it mean to be socially progressive as a sector is a really important part of the definition for us. Because fundamentally, we are an industry filled with people. And if we don't think about the sustainability of the people in our industry. It doesn't really matter the impact that we have on the environment because those choices are made by humans every day in our sector. So that is what the SRA sets out to do. We began in London, as I said. We were very UK-oriented business up until the pandemic. And in the pandemic, I think was our biggest moment as a sector to say, All of these issues that are colliding, that we are facing as restaurants, as hospitality businesses, are actually global in nature. We are a global industry. It is not unusual for us to look around the world and take inspiration from different places. We know that no matter which main market you're looking at, hospitality is staffed by global, you know, citizens around the world. So we see a lot of that movement of people within our industry. And therefore, we need to be having a more global conversation around what good looks like for hospitality. So we use that opportunity when restaurants were closed during the pandemic, or you know, that that really tricky operating period between 2020 and 2022, to really interrogate the work that we were doing and saying, how do you make this fit for a global How do you push from a UK conversation to an international one? And that sort of relaunched the Food Made Good framework as the Food Made Good standard in the beginning of 2023. We're proud to say that from then we now have businesses in 49 countries around the world who are using this framework as a way of assessing and understanding their sustainability. Speaker 2 (6:11) Right. You said food made good framework. So you use that to evaluate businesses. Can you walk us through that and tell us more about how the assessment works and what are the components of the food made good standards? Speaker 1 (6:24) Absolutely. So the food made good standard fundamentally comes from the idea of asking. what is a good restaurant? And, you know, at the end of the day, and when we say good in this context, we are using it in its kind of grandest idea. So we're not talking about what makes the food good in a restaurant, but what makes the restaurant good. And therefore, the assessment is divided into three pillars that sort of structure it. The first is looking at sourcing and the supply chain. At the end of the day, we are food businesses. This is the biggest impact of our businesses in terms of, you know, wider social and environmental impact. It's the work that happens to get the food to our restaurants and onto our plates. The second pillar is the social impact of our businesses. This is where we talk about the people within the hospitality organization and within our sector, as well as our impact on the community outside our doors. So, you know, again, at that beginning of this conversation, we were saying hospitality is fundamentally human. That pillar is looking at our impact on people. The third pillar is operational environmental impact. So this is, I think, where people's brains go when they start to talk about sustainability. They think energy, water. waste, you know, single-use packaging, etc., falls into that operational environmental impact. So you take that as the core pyramid that we are trying to build when assessing our own operations, no matter what size business you are, whether you're a small business all the way up to a, you know, global multinational hotel chain, for example. So looking at that sourcing section, The way that Food Made Good is structured is to speak to restaurants and operators in very human language. So we're not trying to use a lot of ESG jargon where because, again, we we want to talk to chefs. We want to talk to front of house. We want to talk to back of house in terms that actually make a tangible. difference to your business. So the first thing that we talk about in Food Made Good is that a good restaurant celebrates provenance. So what does it mean to celebrate provenance? That means to understand where your ingredients are coming from and how they get to you, how they were farmed and procured, et cetera, along the way. So that section is really talking about transparency of your supply chain, traceability of your supply chain, the standards that you put in place. So