How Restaurants Can Create a Better, Nature-Positive Food System
ELLEN MACARTHUR FOUNDATION EXPLAINS HOW THE HOSPITALITY INDUSTRY HAS A VALUABLE OPPORTUNITY TO CATALYSE A NATURE-POSITIVE FOOD SYSTEM, BUILDING SUPPLY CHAIN RESILIENCE.
The hospitality industry has long shaped which ingredients move into the mainstream. Twenty years ago, sourdough was still largely the domain of independent bakeries, cafés and restaurants experimenting with heritage grains and slower methods. Today, spelt sourdough is a supermarket staple.
That same influence can help shift the food system towards producing food that rebuilds nature rather than depletes it. Chefs already shape far more than what appears on the plate: they influence ingredient demand, supplier relationships and the kinds of farming systems that the market rewards.
The Ellen MacArthur Foundation’s Circular Design for Food offers a framework for thinking about those choices more intentionally. It demonstrates how ingredient selection, sourcing and menu design can help restore biodiversity, rebuild soil, strengthen resilience for producers and support the long-term health and prosperity of the food system itself.
What is Circular Design for Food?
Circular Design for Food is the Ellen MacArthur Foundation’s framework for designing food products, recipes and supply chains so that nature can thrive alongside business.
At the heart of the framework are four design opportunities:
- Diverse ingredients that increase variety across landscapes and diets
- Lower-impact ingredients that place less pressure on nature than conventional defaults
- Upcycled ingredients that make use of food that would otherwise go unused
- Regeneratively produced ingredients grown in ways that work with nature rather than against it
Better for nature, better for business
Between 2023 and 2025, the Foundation tested the framework through the Big Food Redesign Challenge. Fifty-seven companies — including brands, retailers, producers and hospitality businesses — designed a total of 141 products using these principles, drawing on more than 1,000 ingredients. Compared to conventional equivalents, the products were shown to support better outcomes for nature, including lower on-farm emissions and improved biodiversity outcomes.
Beyond the benefits for nature, designing menus in line with circular economy principles enhances long-term business resilience. Ingredient availability and affordability are becoming defining business risks for the sector, with climate volatility, supply chain disruption and price spikes increasingly hitting kitchens first. Diversifying ingredient choices and building stronger supplier relationships can help reduce that exposure. At the same time, diners are increasingly looking for menus that reflect concerns around health, provenance and environmental impact. Venues able to tell a credible story about where ingredients come from — and why they are on the menu — gain a meaningful edge.
How to bring it into the kitchen
Circular design thinking aligns closely with the ambitions of The Sustainable Restaurant Association’s Food Made Good Standard, particularly around sourcing and environmental impact. It brings into focus the idea of design: recognising that menus, ingredient choices and sourcing decisions actively shape demand, influence production systems and ultimately affect the health of landscapes and food systems over time.
Applied in practice, that means looking at menus not just as collections of dishes, but as a series of design decisions that shape what gets grown, valued and wasted across the wider food system. Circular design offers several practical ways hospitality businesses can begin putting that thinking into action:
- Build greater diversity into menus: 60% of the world’s calories come from just three crops, reducing the diversity of agricultural landscapes, degrading soil health and increasing vulnerability to climate and disease pressures. The hospitality industry has long introduced diners to ingredients beyond mainstream commodity crops, from ancient grains like millet and teff to native legumes and regional varieties. Building this diversity into menus helps create demand for the wider range of crops needed to support healthier and more resilient landscapes, strengthening the aims of the More Plants, Better Meat impact area within the Food Made Good Framework.
- Designing waste out at source: Circular design treats food that would otherwise go unused as a starting point, not a problem to manage at the end. This extends the Waste No Food thinking earlier into the supply chain, beyond efforts to reduce what diners leave on the plate, towards menus built around farm-level surplus, whole ingredients, and parts of the harvest that conventional supply chains overlook.
- The supplier relationship as a design tool: Farmers know what grows well, what is underused, what is getting left in the field. Kitchens that treat suppliers as collaborators rather than simply order-takers gain access to ingredients few others are using, while building the long-term relationships that sit at the heart of resilient food systems and the Food Made Good Standard itself.
- Designing the story diners encounter: The food on the plate tells only part of the story. The menu, the service and the broader narrative around a venue are where diners come to understand why an ingredient is on the plate and what it represents. The hospitality industry has a unique ability to make unfamiliar ingredients desirable and to turn abstract ideas about biodiversity, farming and resilience into something tangible, enjoyable and culturally relevant.
The opportunity ahead
The Circular Design for Food framework offers a way of connecting the decisions made in kitchens to outcomes in soil health, biodiversity and farming livelihoods. For businesses already working with The Sustainable Restaurant Association’s Food Made Good Standard, it provides a complementary lens through which ingredient and sourcing decisions can support a food system that works better for nature, people and businesses alike.
The hospitality industry has helped to shape what people want to eat before. It can shape what the future food system looks like next.
To explore the framework further, see the Circular Design for Food guide and the wider food and the circular economy overview.
About Ellen MacArthur Foundation
Ellen MacArthur Foundation is an independent charity on a mission to accelerate the transition to a circular economy.
The linear, take-make-waste economy is the main driver behind today’s crises of climate change, biodiversity loss and pollution. Designed to thrive within planetary boundaries, a circular economy eliminates waste and pollution, circulates products and materials at their highest value, and regenerates nature. It’s a global system that delivers better outcomes for people and the environment while driving economic resilience and opportunity.
Backed by evidence and powered by partnerships across sectors and regions, Ellen MacArthur Foundation is a systems change organisation aiming to reshape markets. Learn more at www.ellenmacarthurfoundation.org.
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