7 Things to Consider When You Think About Provenance

1. CHOOSE LOCAL FOODS.

This is often first to mind when you think about provenance – how far has an ingredient travelled to get to your kitchen? While food miles contribute significantly less to carbon emissions than production methods, sourcing food locally has plenty of other benefits: building short, resilient supply chains, supporting local businesses and small-scale agriculture, keeping money in the regional economy and appealing to customers. Without long journeys and weeks of refrigeration, it also often means produce at its best. Here are some actions you can take to build local foods into your offering.

• It’s worth defining what the term ‘local’ means to your restaurant. As a general rule of thumb, The SRA defines ‘local produce’ as that sourced within a 100-mile (160km) radius if you’re based in a major city, or within a 50-mile (80km) radius outside the city.
• Make a commitment to serving more local food. This could be increasing the overall percentage of local ingredients you buy, or focusing on one food group at a time – for example, aiming to source 100% of your meat locally by 2026.
• Organise team visits to local farms and producers, giving your staff a more tangible understanding of where your food comes from.
• You could also explore dishes, ingredients or cooking methods traditional in your area; this is a nice way to connect your customers with the food heritage of the locality.

2. COOK WITH THE SEASONS.

Allowing your menu to be led by the seasons brings greater variety and creativity to your kitchen, offering your diners new flavours and unique stories and helping your business to stand out from your competitors. Sourcing seasonal ingredients also enables you to support production systems that are more environmentally friendly and biodiverse. Finally, working with seasonal foods allows for a degree of anticipation and excitement, for both chefs and customers. Waiting for those summer strawberries or the first apples of the year makes them taste all the better, and these ‘limited edition’ vibes will make the experience more special for your customers.

• Focus on what foods are in season in your area and let your menus be inspired by that throughout the year.
• Work closely with growers and fishers so that you know when certain foods will be ready for your kitchen. This lets you plan ahead to a certain degree, while guaranteeing that you’ll be purchasing a particular quantity can provide great financial peace of mind to your suppliers.
• Encourage chefs to start experimenting with the wild foods native to your area. This could include providing training in foraging from a local expert.

3. WHO ARE THE PEOPLE BEHIND THE FOOD?

The people behind the food form a big part of its provenance, bringing a human aspect to the story you tell to your customers. 

• Choose small-scale suppliers and cut out the middleman where you can, putting direct trade agreements in place. 
• Cultivate long-term relationships with the farmers, producers and fishers with whom you work. Get to know them on a personal basis.
• Work to gain visibility over your supply chain and ensure that human rights and labour rights are protected at every step. Be particularly careful around high-risk commodities like chocolate and coffee.

4. TRACEABILITY AND TRANSPARENCY ARE CRITICAL.

Knowing where your products are from and how they were made is key to ensuring they're produced in way that meets your sustainability standards. Without traceability, you can’t evaluate or manage the social and environmental risks in your supply chain, nor can you take action to improve your impact.

• Look for producers and suppliers who already have robust environmental and social standards in place for how they do business. 
• Create a written agreement for each supplier, outlining your minimum standards for things like human rights, fair terms of trade, sustainable agricultural practices, deforestation, biodiversity, soil health, water stress, animal welfare and sustainable manufacturing practices.
• Demand visibility over the sourcing of every ingredient you buy. Shorter supply chains will make this easier.

5. PUT BIODIVERSITY ON THE MENU.

By actively championing biodiversity on menus, chefs can build consumer interest in more diverse ingredients. This can strengthen our food systems, support farmers and producers and improve public health. It can also boost creativity and help your restaurant stand out from the crowd! 

Since they are naturally adapted for local conditions and haven’t been bred for fast growth and high yield at the expense of everything else, heritage varieties of animals and crops native to your region are also likely to have superior nutritional value, flavour and texture compared to more commercial species. 

• Start featuring a wider range of plant foods on your menu, including those that are less common. Explore ancient grains like millets, teff, einkorn and amaranth. While yields of landrace crops are typically lower, genetic diversity means these varieties stand a much better chance of surviving disease, pest outbreaks or climate shocks. Furthermore, despite lower yields, farmers often see increased profits as they spend less on fertilisers, herbicides and pesticides.
• When it comes to sourcing meat, look for rare/heritage breeds unique to your area. Raising heritage breeds in their native climates, on natural diets and with the integrated use of manure is likely to result in healthy animals while also supporting the soil, plant life and natural biodiverse ecosystems on and around the farm. 
• If you serve seafood, choose species that are less popular and therefore less likely to come from overfished stocks. Avoid the ‘Big Five’ (cod, haddock, salmon, tuna and prawns).
• Invasive alien species are one of the biggest direct drivers of biodiversity loss. One smart solution is to put these non-native species on menus, controlling populations and protecting local ecosystems by creating demand. Learn which invasive species are a problem for ecosystems in your area. Could you work any of those into your menu?

6. AGRICULTURAL METHODS MATTER.

Agricultural systems and food production make an enormous contribution to the climate crisis, biodiversity loss, soil and water degradation and deforestation. Use the transparency in your supply chain to ensure that you are supporting agricultural practices that work to restore nature rather than degrading it further.

• Serve less meat, but better quality. Look for meat and dairy from regenerative or agroecological farms. Animal welfare is a part of this story, too. If possible, switch to free range or organic meat, dairy and eggs. If cost is a barrier, focus on one item at a time: could you start buying only organic eggs?
• Clear your supply chain of products that contribute to deforestation. The biggest culprits are beef, soy and palm oil; cocoa and coffee are other significant contributors. Be aware that these can be hidden in many other products. Palm oil is a staple ingredient in processed foods as well as many non-food items, while over three-quarters (77%) of global soy is fed to livestock for meat and dairy production.
• Look for farmers who limit the use of chemical pesticides and fertilisers.
• When it comes to seafood, how was it caught? Fishing methods like gill nets and dredging are extremely damaging to marine environments.

7. PROVENANCE MEANS TELLING THE STORY.

Sharing all of the above information with your customers is an important part of your commitment to provenance. By making this information available to different stakeholder groups, you improve transparency and accountability and encourage good practice from others in the industry. For suppliers, understanding your work to celebrate provenance can help inform policy and practice. Sharing this information with the wider public can also attract customers, build your brand reputation and perhaps even influence them to be more considered in their food decisions elsewhere.  

• Provide training for your front-of-house staff so that they have the knowledge and language to discuss your food’s provenance with diners.
• Provide information about the provenance of your ingredients on your menus, website and/or social media channels. 
• Participate in (or create) initiatives or campaigns to promote awareness around provenance and supply chain transparency. 
• Find more tips here about how to put provenance on the menu in meaningful ways.

Learn more about why Celebrate Provenance is a focus area of the Food Made Good Framework here. We’ll be diving into sustainable sourcing over the next few months; for stories and insights from across our global network, sign up to our newsletter and follow us on Instagram and LinkedIn!