How to Put Provenance on Your Drinks Menu

What does provenance mean for your business? 

With your own brand identity and location in mind, explore what provenance means to your business.

• This might mean reinventing classic cocktails with a fresh spin using locally sourced ingredients, experimenting with wild local foods, joining a community garden to grow some ingredients yourself or researching recipes once traditional in your area. 
• At Analogue Initiative in Singapore, drinks are designed to showcase local, seasonal and heritage ingredients, with seasonally changing cocktails showcased alongside regularly changing beers and an all-natural wine list. The bar doesn’t source fresh citrus, instead making use of locally available ingredients such as prickly pear and yuzu.
• Meanwhile, at Kitchen Table restaurant in London, provenance guides every part of the offering, including the drinks list. “We try to source drinks from Britain as much as possible. All of our cocktails are seasonal and often based on ingredients that we can forage ourselves throughout the year,” explains co-owner and Service and Beverage Director Sandia Chang. When it comes to the wine list, not everything on offer is British, but the focus is on the people behind the product. “We want to know that they're the ones growing the grapes and using those to make their own wines,” Sandia tells us. “They're with the product from beginning to end. There's passion behind what you’re drinking.” 
• Explore what’s produced in your area, from unique craft beers to artisan spirits, unusual soft drinks or fermented options like kombucha. 

How will provenance shape your sourcing strategy? 

Before you start looking at your drinks menu itself, provenance needs to become a key consideration for how you source your products and ingredients. 

• Get to know your suppliers better and have conversations about their values and practices. Re-evaluating your supply chain to bring provenance and traceability to the forefront can have a lasting impact.    
• Darwin & Wallace works closely with key suppliers and is meticulous in securing written agreements that favour local or British produce and include commitments to specific animal welfare standards, sustainable seafood, palm oil-free products and ethical trade commitments. They also require environmental and land management commitments from each supplier. They also produce ingredients themselves where possible, with small gardens at a number of sites where they keep bees for honey and grow rhubarb, hard herbs and tomatoes. 
• Make use of a diverse range of ingredients, including more unusual varieties of fruit and vegetables. This can be a fantastic way to showcase your area’s unique offerings, while also helping agriculture build better biodiversity and stronger ecosystems.  

What does provenance mean behind the bar? 

• Make sure bartenders and servers are confident in talking about provenance, clearly communicating not just the stories behind your menu, but also why this matters. In addition to training, you could also consider team visits to the farms that supply your business – this can be very effective at deepening their connection to your offering and giving them the language they need to share this with customers.  
• Working towards zero waste honours the resources and hard work that are required to produce every gram of each ingredient – a true celebration of provenance.  

What’s the right way to showcase provenance on your menu? 

• Where possible, focus on primary producers – the origins of your ingredients – rather than the suppliers through which they came to you.  
• Include all your menus, from beer and wine lists to cocktails, soft drinks and bar snacks.   
• Add producer information to each of your menu descriptions, or consider a separate provenance statement.  
• The stories behind your drinks can be told in many different ways. You could use blackboards or sandwich boards, a card on each table, a QR code that connects to a page on your website, or simply a section of your drinks menu.  
• When it comes to the format, don’t be afraid to get creative: could you include photos of your top producers, or a map showing exactly where your food comes from? In the UK, Peach Pubs put their producers front and centre on the Food & Drink page of their website, sharing the stories and photos of the people behind their wines, gin, coffee, tea and water. 

For more inspiring stories about how F&B businesses are celebrating provenance on their menus, check out our News & Insights page, sign up to our newsletter and follow us on Instagram and LinkedIn!