With the world prioritizing environmental conservation with respect to every sector, hospitality is no different. Restaurants becoming stellar successes with great menus alone is a thing of the past. Today, the consumers are quite conscious about the ecological impact of what goes on their plate.

An increasing number of people also want to make an impact through the bills they are paying. At this juncture, ‘restaurant sustainability’ has emerged as the latest buzzword in the industry, even though many remain oblivious to its actual meaning. We sought Sanjeev Nanda, a prominent Dubai-based restaurateur, to help us decode this latest trend.

“In the recent years, the awareness around the effect of human actions on the environment has increased at a great pace. Several people fail to find a platform to channelize the contributions they wish to make towards environmental conservation, but that changes when restaurants play an active role through sustainable practices,” says Nanda.

The Miss Tess owner adds, “When people find themselves in a position to choose between an eatery that gives nothing back to the world and an eatery that actively adopts sustainability as a part of its daily operations, they tend to lean towards the latter. And that too for a very simple reason: dining at a sustainable restaurant tells them that the money they spent was not only on food; it was also a contribution to save the environment.”

But what does restaurant sustainability really mean? According to Sanjeev Nanda, the term refers to the practice of restaurants ensuring that they have minimum impact on the planet. This is achieved through a number of consistent and focussed actions – sourcing of sustainable ingredients, reducing carbon footprint, aiming for a shorter supply chain, effectively reducing food wastage, managing water and energy consumption, and recycling to name a few.

However, the implications of restaurant sustainability are not limited to just the efforts made by restaurants towards helping the environment, Nanda points out. A core concept here is also to enable the customers do their part by giving them an opportunity to make their contributions towards driving change.

“As more and more people make their dining decisions based on the value that they are getting from a business, sustainable practices at restaurants can maximize their money’s worth by making them feel that they are making a difference. This is something that works to the benefit of both – the restaurant and the environment,” explains Sanjeev Nanda.

Adopting sustainable practices does not mean just adopting the latest fad – it means making active contributions towards making the planet a liveable space for the current generation and the ones to come. By dining at a sustainable restaurant, the customers pay for more than what’s on their plate; they pay for a better world.