Restaurants hoping to make a positive impact on the climate face an enduring challenge: selling their ambitious goals to diners simply looking to have a good time
This story was produced in partnership with Civil Eats.
The “PLNT Impact Tracker” on PLNT Burger’s website wants you to think about what you’re eating. The tool from the East Coast vegan chain — a digital take on a split-flap mechanical display that appears on its website and in the chain’s ordering app — estimates the amounts of water, land, CO2, and oil saved by eating vegan burgers. The numbers come from the 2022 environmental, social, and governance (ESG) report of the vegan brand Beyond Meat, from which PLNT Burger gets its patties.
These numbers are largely hypothetical. The most accurate measure of land or CO2 “saved” by ordering a PLNT Burger is only attained if every purchase were originally intended to be for a fast-food beef burger instead. And of course, it’s not like for every PLNT Burger sold, a factory farm gives up five acres of land, or releases a cow from the slaughter line — actually meaningful solutions to the factory meat problem. Nor has eating plant-based meat even made a significant impact on beef production, according to a 2023 report.
But the numbers still count for something: They provide a tangible incentive to address an oft-intangible problem. “In the app, we calculate your resource savings as an individual consumer, and then we share that with our community as encouragement,” says PLNT Burger co-founder Jonah Goldman. This ideally reinforces the connection in the customer’s brain between their everyday choices and the resulting impacts on the environment: “You’ve saved so many gallons of water, you’ve saved so many square meters of land and emissions and energy,” as Goldman says. “Congratulations. Thank you.” PLNT Burger further incentivizes plant-based purchases by turning that data into a loyalty program, rewarding customers with free food for amounts of water or land “saved.”
However, if you were to walk into one of PLNT Burger’s at least 12 locations, you won’t find a deluge of information about the environmental impact of eating meat. Instead, you’ll see signage about the health benefits of plant-based eating — the “primary drivers of consumer choice are personal benefit,” says Goldman — and the menu board, designed like any one in other fast-food chains. Goldman says that though employees are trained to speak on the environmental benefits of plant-based eating, “it’s not as embedded in our cashier training or our interactions with consumers, because we really are focused on positive guest experience.” The environmental mission can come later.
Climate change has marked effects on the restaurant industry. Changing temperatures and weather patterns mean ingredients that were once common are now harder to come by, and sourcing ingredients from sustainable farms can often be more expensive. Some restaurateurs hope that by championing things like locally sourced produce and sustainable seafood, diners will understand what a climate-friendly diet looks like. But while speaking about the environment is important, “preaching,” as Goldman puts it, is a turn-off, especially in hospitality, an industry that consumers rely on to provide, among other things, a good time... without interruptions. This puts restaurateurs in a precarious position of having to communicate choices and challenges without sullying the fun of eating out. Climate messaging can’t work if customers are too put off to walk through the door once, let alone habitually.
Yang’s Kitchen, which Chris Yang opened in Los Angeles with his wife in 2019, has always focused on quality ingredients, like locally milled flour for its scallion pancakes, and produce from Food Roots, which distributes locally grown Asian fruits and vegetables. On its website, the restaurant describes itself as a place that “strives to source local, sustainable and organic when possible,” and lists its farmers on the menu. Initially, the priority was on quality and flavor, not necessarily environmental impact. But when COVID hit, Yang says it clarified the bigger picture. “I realized if we, as a society, are going to handle COVID so poorly — it worried me about what would happen when climate change really takes effect,” he says.
So he took action. He worked on getting even more supply from local farms, and at a time when there were seemingly constant grocery shortages, he connected customers directly to the farms where he was getting his eggs and produce. He focused on finding suppliers that engaged in regenerative farming, and partnered with Zero Foodprint, a nonprofit that helps restaurants contribute to sustainable farming initiatives, often by adding a one percent fee to every check. ZFP then distributes those funds, via grants, to farmers for regenerative farming projects. “As I looked up more about regenerative farming, Zero Foodprint popped up,” says Yang. “I saw these chefs and these restaurants are already involved in doing this.” The bottom of the Yang’s Kitchen menu notes to diners, “We are working with Zero Foodprint to restore the planet.”
Restaurants that care about the climate have a number of resources at their disposal to both help with and certify their commitments. Crave Fishbar, for instance, advertises itself as New York’s “first 100 percent sustainable seafood restaurant” by doing things like following the Monterey Bay Aquarium’s sustainable seafood recommendations, composting leftover food with Afterlife Ag, which uses the compost to grow mushrooms (which they then use in cooking), and giving leftover oyster shells to the Billion Oyster Project. Crave Fishbar is also a B Corp-certified restaurant, recognized for its social impact along with several other criteria, including environmental impact. These are just a few of many designations — like the Michelin Green Star and the Green Restaurant Award — that use different criteria to affirm a restaurant’s adherence to or engagement with sustainability standards.
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Wonho Frank Lee
The proliferation of third-party certifications gives restaurants a shorthand way to flaunt their environmental bona fides in a manner that might be more palatable to consumers: Seeing a certificate on a restaurant wall or posted on its Instagram account assures diners that someone else has done the work of making sure a restaurant is environmentally friendly, so they can skip researching it themselves.
Often, restaurants eschew the language of climate impact for the more euphemistic term “sustainability,” focusing on the benefits of their sourcing and other practices rather than categorically revealing the harms of practices like factory farming. Climate change feels heavy, so the idea is to point out smaller-scale decisions in the hopes that customers are inspired to make the jump to a larger cause.
Owner Brian Owens says that at his recently opened Crave Sushi Bar, a spinoff of Fishbar also in Manhattan, customers are sometimes surprised to see that bluefin tuna, a sushi staple that also happens to be critically endangered, isn’t on the menu. “We get specific,” he says of the need to keep the diner informed of intentional menu substitutions and choices. “We call it out. You know where it’s from. We actually have sourcing and mission statements on our menus,” he says, which state that the restaurant serves “only wild caught, sustainable & responsibly farmed seafood.” Crave also has an item on the menu called “Save the Reef” for $4, a direct donation to the Billion Oyster Project that anyone can add to their bill. Combined with the sourcing information, this language helps guests understand why they’re seeing seafood like steelhead trout from the Hudson Valley on a sushi menu.
While these goals and initiatives are printed on the menu and posted online, they’re not explicitly spoken about through the course of the meal unless the customer inquires — and according to Owens, they typically don’t ask. “We are not trying to preach, we’re not trying to take up too much space,” he says. “Because I don’t know how many people care. They just want to have something really delicious.” Customers who are attracted to sustainable eating “come find us because of our sourcing,” he adds, but “there’s only so many places we can communicate that.”
Sometimes, even adding information to the menu is too much. “I could be sourcing herbs or scallions from a certain farmer, but at some point, it’s excessive to call out” every single source, says Yang. Customers might at first be intrigued by seeing a list of suppliers on a menu, but get bored halfway through reading it. “It just becomes too verbose.” Yang sometimes spotlights local suppliers on Instagram, where people can dig deeper if they want. But at the restaurant counter, the focus is on what the diner is ordering, not the “ethical, sustainable, additive-free” products that make up the food.
Yang agrees with Owens that once customers are in the restaurant, they don’t really ask about sourcing, mission, or climate change impact. There are customers who are self-educated and seek out certain restaurants because of their practices, and those for whom sourcing and intention are incidental. “People don’t really ask,” says Yang. It’s a pattern he’s become intimately familiar with: “They either know, or they just don’t care.”
For many sustainable restaurants, the greater challenge is educating diners on the idea that necessary interventions in the face of climate change, like supporting small farms and sustainable projects, are worth paying for. Even though it’s become more common, sustainability costs more than conventional food production. Government subsidies of industrial farming — to the tune of $38 billion per year, writes Alicia Kennedy in Mold — mean that commercial produce and meat shipped thousands of miles is usually the cheaper option for restaurants and diners; no amount of careful menu planning can change the fact that a chicken grown in a small, sustainable operation will cost more than a chicken confined in a factory farm.
Often, a restaurant or chef’s personal commitment runs up against that economic reality.
Adding a Zero Foodprint contribution to diners’ checks is one direct way to call out climate change in every interaction — and invite support for fighting it — but unfortunately, the initiative wound up being unsustainable for Yang, who ended the partnership earlier this year after just four years. “We were anticipating the restaurant service charge bill to take effect, and there was a lot of backlash from customers about having service fees,” he says. And this was on top of general griping about his restaurant’s high prices compared to other Asian restaurants in the San Gabriel Valley, says Yang.
More consumers than ever expect restaurants to pursue environmentally conscious practices. However, a recent survey says only 34 percent are willing to pay more for them when given the choice. Customers might care about sustainability goals, but adding a fee to every check, on top of higher prices for climate-friendlier ingredients, seems like too much at a time when even regular groceries are so expensive.
Preparing customers for higher prices requires initiating an explicit conversation the customer usually won’t start. Firetype Chocolate used to offer free pieces of chocolate as part of a birthday program at its home within Thornes Marketplace in Northampton, Massachusetts. “Every year we gave away over 1,200 free truffles, caramels, honeycombs, and more for people’s birthdays — no purchase required, no email signup, no catch,” it wrote on Instagram. But recently, it had to announce the ending of that perk. “We’re ordering larger quantities than ever before, but six pounds of chocolate that cost us $72 in 2021 is now $129 thanks to climate, crop disease, and market speculators.” Handing out over a thousand chocolates a year no longer adds up.
Owner Dan McKinney had previously boasted when ingredients were sourced locally or organically, or what was made in-house, and over the last few years switched from using corn syrup to ingredients like organic tapioca. But recent years have seen poor harvests of cocoa in West Africa, where most of the world’s chocolate is grown, due to bad weather and tree disease. McKinney, who uses Valrhona chocolate, says he was recently told chocolate prices would increase by 40 percent in the fall because of the smaller harvests.
“We had been at $2.50 a piece, and now we’re up to around $2.65. But I’m running out of tricks in the toolbox,” says McKinney. “Climate has always been in the back of my mind, but it’s never been something that I communicated to customers in such a direct way until now,” he says. “I’m going to feel even sillier asking people for [almost] $3 for one bite.”
Experts largely agree that if our agricultural systems are going to be sustainable for the environment, they have to get local, and stay small. Eating locally and seasonally from non-factory farms means fewer emissions and water use, healthier soil, and often a more symbiotic relationship between humans and animals.
But if saving the planet were as easy as buying the right things and eating at the right restaurants, most diners would have done it already. And even those who are dining out at climate-conscious restaurants often don’t want to hear overt climate messaging. That leaves restaurateurs to essentially only bring it up in an emergency, as a caveat about high pricing or the lack of certain ingredients, not as a positive part of the hospitality experience. Which enforces the idea that talking about the environment at all in a dining setting is a drag, a detriment to the joy of eating out.
Even if sustainable efforts stayed mostly in the background of restaurant operations, most people cannot afford to dine exclusively at sustainable restaurants (or any restaurant) for every meal. And even if we could, doing so won’t grant us the overarching agency or control that so many unrestrained, greenwashed fantasies advertise: Dining at one climate-conscious restaurant does not make the broader restaurant industry sustainable. Buying regeneratively grown ingredients that have become more expensive due to climate change does not keep climate change from happening, or guarantee that those ingredients can be harvested more eco-consciously.
Diners, who are likely aware of these issues, perhaps become more aware through restaurant messaging, but rarely are they given anything more to do about it beyond a menu choice. They are told that the decision they’ve already made is the right one and that’s it, leaving them to stew in the malaise that results from feeling like they’re eating the last pasture-raised, holistically-grazed, locally sourced chicken on the Titanic.
Any further impact happens outside the restaurants themselves. Perhaps messaging around sourcing or climate change will galvanize diners to encourage their representatives to endorse environmentally friendly legislation, or maybe it will spur them to buy more produce from local farms, or give up factory-farmed meat. Industry organizations like the James Beard Foundation are creating spaces to “raise awareness” of climate change among chefs.
Although the success of one sustainable restaurant won’t automatically make the restaurant next door follow the same practices, Owens, of Crave, says things are changing. “Ten years ago, 12 years ago, there were a lot fewer people doing this. There are more people now that do care,” he says. “My responsibility is to continue those conversations.” For now, Owens and other restaurateurs still see value in walking the razor’s edge between self-indulgence and climate-conscious urgency.
One thing this communication can do is remind people that the effects of climate change are not just prescient, but happening now. “This is a 1:1 link to crops not coming out good. And I think people need to wrap their heads around that this is not some far-off thing,” says McKinney. “This is hitting you right now in a way that you didn’t think it would.” Even if your menu doesn’t say it, everything on it is affected by climate. The restaurants most vocal about the issue just understand we can no longer afford the luxury of not knowing.
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