How to Put Provenance on Your Menu in Meaningful Ways
Over the past decade, we’ve seen provenance included as a key feature on more and more menus. It’s hard to deny that sharing the provenance of your ingredients is a valuable marketing tool; when customers can connect with the story behind their meal, both their dining experience and your brand become more memorable. Bidfood’s UK trend predictions for 2024 include regional provenance as one of the top factors that consumers will pay attention to, with 76% saying dishes with provenance listed are appealing.
Beyond meeting consumer demand, what does provenance really mean when it comes to your procurement policy, and why is it an important part of your sustainability work?
The real benefits of local food
Food miles might be the first thing that springs to mind – but distance travelled is just one part of what provenance means for your restaurant. It is true that sourcing ingredients from far afield may have a heavy carbon footprint, particularly if air travel is involved. However, for restaurant operators working to reduce their Scope 3 emissions, it’s important to recognise that there are other factors at play.
For starters, the biggest portion of any food’s environmental impact actually comes from production, not transport. For foods with high emissions – say, beef – the distance travelled will contribute a relatively small proportion of the carbon footprint. This is also affected by energy used in production. For example, tomatoes grown in heated greenhouses in countries like the UK may actually have a higher footprint than those imported from Mediterranean countries – even when you take the extra transport into account.
This doesn’t mean you should ditch the local mindset altogether; far from it. There are a still wealth of benefits associated with building short, local supply chains. These are far more resilient than longer, global chains, which are more vulnerable to climate shocks or international conflicts. Buying locally also supports small-scale agriculture, keeps more money in the local economy and helps your business put down deeper roots in its community. Without long journeys or weeks of refrigeration, it also often means that you’re getting fresh, in-season produce when it’s at its absolute best – and often at a more reasonable price.
Celebrating provenance beyond carbon
Measuring and reducing carbon emissions across the entire supply chain is incredibly important for the food industry – but it’s not the only thing relevant when it comes to celebrating provenance on menus. Celebrate Provenance is one of the 10 key focus areas in our Food Made Good Standard; when it comes to assessing the sustainability performance of businesses in this section, we look at where a restaurant’s ingredients come from and how they work with their suppliers and supply chain. Our goal is to encourage businesses to choose products that are fully traceable and suppliers who actively work to protect the environment and uphold human rights across the entire supply chain.
How your kitchen can celebrate provenance in meaningful ways
Making provenance one of your core values means demonstrating your commitment to sustainable, traceable and ethical sourcing across every aspect of your business, from procurement to how you design your menus, train your staff and market your restaurant. Here are some ways that your kitchen team can bring provenance to the forefront.
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Consider more than food miles when you think about carbon. Of course foods grown closer to home will have lower travel-related emissions, but consider production methods, too.
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Go further than carbon: in what other ways does the production of each food affect the environment? Is that farmer using regenerative farming methods that nourish the soil and protect natural ecosystems? Was this fish caught from over-exploited stocks? Does this pork come from a happy, healthy, outdoor-reared pig?
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Choose local farmers and suppliers where it makes sense. Again, not only does this reduce food miles, but it supports small-scale agriculture, boosts your local economy and keeps local food systems in operation.
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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 likely won’t happen overnight, but can have a huge and lasting impact.
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Explore what food heritage means to your business, then use this as a way to let provenance shine through. For a pub, this might mean reinventing comfort food dishes once traditional in your area; for an Indian restaurant, maybe it’s recreating classic Goan dishes using locally sourced ingredients.
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Make sure everyone across your supply chain is treated fairly. This gets trickier for ingredients that must be sourced from further afield – for businesses in the UK, think things like citrus fruits, coffee or chocolate. In these cases, look for those certified by reputable international bodies like Fairtrade or MSC to ensure sustainable sourcing and fair treatment of farmers, fishers and growers.
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Make use of a diverse range of ingredients; think heritage breeds, ancient grains and unusual varieties of fruit and vegetables. Supporting farmers who work with less common species of plants and animals can be a fantastic way to showcase your area’s food heritage, while also helping agriculture build better biodiversity and stronger ecosystems.
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Waste less food. A kitchen that works under a zero waste ethos is one that truly honours the resources and hard work that are required to produce every gram of food – a true celebration of provenance.
How to put provenance on your menu
The more you can share of the story behind your ingredients and dishes, the better. Not only are customers hungry for this information, but celebrating provenance encourages a greater understanding of food’s origins and the impact behind every one of our food choices; fostering and maintaining this understanding will help to create a better, more sustainable food system for future generations. As further incentive, this is also a way to communicate quality and attention to detail, helping to justify a higher price point. Here are some ways you can bring provenance to life for your customers.
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Where possible, focus on primary producers – the origins of your ingredients – rather than the suppliers through which they came to you.
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Include all your menus. Putting provenance on your breakfast, lunch and/or dessert menus is just as important as doing it on your à la carte.
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Add producer information to each of your menu descriptions, or consider a separate provenance statement.
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The stories behind your dishes can be told in many different ways – don’t be afraid to get creative. You could consider using blackboards or sandwich boards, a card on each table, a QR code that connects to a page on your website, or simply the front page in your menu. When it comes to the format, visuals can really bring it to life: could you include photos of your producers, or a map showing exactly where your food comes from?
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Make sure your staff are confident in talking about provenance, accurately communicating not just the stories behind your dishes, 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 the food and giving them the language they need to have similar discussions with customers.
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Consider taking the Food Made Good Standard. A relevant, recognised, comprehensive and industry-specific accreditation is a great way to share your sustainability work and attention to provenance with your customers, staff and stakeholders.
Interested in learning more about our Food Made Good Standard? See the full Framework here, find out how it all works here, get in touch with any questions at standard@thesra.org or sign up here to get started!
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Jocelyn leads our UK Comms team and is responsible for managing our content strategy, growing our audience and building our global reputation. Jocelyn holds a BSc in Hospitality Management and an MSc in Food Culture & Communications, and is a member of the Irish Food Writers’ Guild. Her background includes on-the-ground F&B experience; a decade of food writing, editing and publishing; content creation for some of Ireland’s biggest food brands; and developing the content marketing strategy for a suite of menu management and carbon tracking software.
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