Home Kitchen & Laundry Should You Open Your Own Sustainable Restaurant?

Should You Open Your Own Sustainable Restaurant?

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NATIONAL REPORT—Starting your own restaurant business is an exciting decision that can lead to a prosperous future. It is far from easy, however, and the better prepared you are before throwing yourself into it, the more likely you will be to find ongoing success. There are so many different aspects to starting a restaurant that are easy to forget, so it is essential that you make sure you have as much knowledge and, if possible, experience before you get started. This is particularly relevant if you intend to focus on sustainability within your business, as the additional consideration can take more effort to adhere to.

Here are some points to think about if you are eager to open your own sustainable restaurant.

What Is it Like Opening a Restaurant?

Running a restaurant, sustainable or not, is a hugely difficult project for even the most experienced and confident business owners. Whether you have already had years of experience in the restaurant and hospitality industry or have only just begun to think about opening your own establishment, it is important to remember that every venue is unique. Even if two restaurants share many similarities, the difference in location, staff, and surrounding local market will create tangible differences that shouldn’t be overlooked. This means that anyone opening a new restaurant needs to balance listening to outside advice and trying their own ideas.

Is Sustainability a Stable Market?

One of the many compelling reasons to start a restaurant that focuses on sustainability is the fact that the environment has become a much more visible and well-known priority for the wider population. Of course, there are companies out there that try to take advantage of society’s concerns for the environment by greenwashing and making their actions appear more eco-conscious than they truly are. Although this isn’t ethical, it does prove that sustainability is a market you can expect to grow in the coming years due to everyone’s attempts to make better choices.

How to Start Your Own Sustainable Restaurant

If you are prepared to commit a lot of time, money, and energy to the project of opening your own sustainable restaurant, the rewards could be amazing. This guide will hopefully show you how to make the best out of this opportunity so you can enjoy the process of starting and running a successful sustainable restaurant.

Find the Right Location

The location of a restaurant is a hugely important factor to take into consideration. This is because the location of a restaurant has a direct impact on who will visit and what your target market should be. For example, opening a restaurant in a quiet town might not make it as easy to attract customers as it would be to open one in a bustling city. Of course, this all depends on who you want to cater to, what your budget is, and the type of restaurant you wish to run.

Another consideration when it comes to the location of your restaurant is the availability of suitable venues. There might be an ideal place for your new sustainable restaurant, but there are no available premises. There might also be somewhere with many available premises but none that meet your criteria. What’s more, you may find your dream location, only to learn it’s not a sustainable place and will lead to a higher carbon footprint than you initially hoped for. For instance, is your restaurant site close to public transportation? If not, it might mean customers will have to drive a longer distance to your establishment via car, which then impacts the local environment through fuel emissions.

Another factor to think about here is your stock. Is your restaurant located near suppliers, such as local farms, fruit and vegetable suppliers, and others that you will need to purchase from? If the meals your restaurant serves have a lot of food miles, it’s not exactly ideal in terms of sustainability. Preferably, if sustainability is in the cards, you need to choose a location that’s close to local suppliers so that you can order locally instead of from those hours away or even abroad. The fewer miles your food and beverages have had to travel to reach the customer’s stomach, the more sustainable it is, causing less pollution and ensuring your sustainability rating is higher.

Whatever the case, make sure to write a list of where your ideal restaurant would be and what the premises would look like—do you want to open a peaceful family diner or a high-end kitchen in the city? Once you have a list of your most desired qualities in your future restaurant, work out which sustainability factors you can focus your efforts on and which can be classed as “nice to have” rather than “essential.”

Design Your Venue

Perhaps you have found the perfect premises and are excited to start renovations, or maybe you have bought a plot of land to build your own restaurant from the ground up. Either way, the atmosphere of a restaurant starts with its features both outside and in. Subliminal observations a customer makes as they walk past, pause outside, and step into your restaurant all contribute to their feelings about the establishment—but it’s not solely aesthetics that make the premises appealing; it’s sustainability within the design.

Plenty of architectural and design aspects come into play in terms of sustainability and green ratings. Triple glazing windows and all-around wall and roof insulation, for instance, help keep the heat in and the cold out, leading to a significant reduction in energy use—and also bills, which is handy for saving cash and using those funds to put more juice into other areas of sustainability within your restaurant.

You might also want to look at historic buildings for their heat retention factor, too; for example, in resort or beach locations old-fashioned thatched roofing has a greater insulating value than any other kind of traditional roof covering. With the right material and detailing, a properly maintained thatched roof can keep a building warm in the winter and cooler in the summer, thereby eliminating the need for as much electric and gas-powered heating in the colder months and air-conditioning in the hotter season.

These factors are why it is so important to remember that decorating and designing isn’t a frivolous use of your time but is crucial to your overall success as a sustainable establishment. Think of what you would appreciate most in a restaurant’s appearance or seek the guidance of a professional interior designer or an architect if you’re constructing your building from the ground up.

Create Your Restaurant’s Brand

As with any business, your restaurant must have a strong, consistent brand to act as the face of your company. This includes the presentation of your menus, the layout of your website, the style of your logo, and even the clothing worn by your employees. If you want to open a sustainable restaurant, all these details will reflect on your values as a business focused on improving the world. Even small details such as aprons made from sustainable materials can help build a cohesive brand identity for your restaurant.

Source Sustainable & Ethical Food

One of the most important aspects of running a restaurant that focuses on sustainability is where you source your ingredients. Depending on your preferences for the business, you might choose to offer an entirely vegan or vegetarian menu or perhaps make sure that every item on the menu is made only with ingredients sourced from local farmers and suppliers.

Recruit Talented People

Great staff makes all the difference in a customer-facing business. If you want your sustainable restaurant to stand out not only for its ethical stance but also for its customer service, you will need to invest time and money into finding people who share your vision and want to provide the best.

However, as a sustainable and progressive restaurant, it’s crucial to attract and retain the right employees that will see your dream become a reality. To do that, you need to be fair with your offerings. As a progressive restaurant owner with their priorities in the right place and with a focus on caring for the planet and its inhabitants, you need to put your money where your mouth is—and that means paying staff a fair wage and giving your employees decent incentives to work for you.

You’re changing the landscape in the culinary industry as a progressive, sustainable food outlet; however, that also goes hand in hand with better working conditions for staff—and you won’t get the right people who share your vision and values without rewarding them appropriately. Satisfaction in the workplace is just as much of an important modern-day initiative as sustainability; miserable employees unhappy in their roles who can barely make ends meet won’t take your restaurant very far at all—so ensuring their wellbeing and welfare are healthy and nurtured is vital to both their success and yours. Always lead with passion, fairness, support, and kindness, not fear or over-frugalness, and your staff will help you make your dreams a reality.

Attract Customers

Once you have created your brand, sourced your ingredients, and hired your employees, you still need to make your target market aware of your existence as a sustainable restaurant. This is one of the most important steps since, without it, you would have a great restaurant with nobody to enjoy it.

Getting your message and mission out there in the public eye is critical to your success, and now’s the time to do so since everyone is watching out for progressive business owners like yourself—especially younger generations. For example, research by Deloitte suggests Gen Z is leading the way in terms of sustainability, with 50 percent reporting that they have reduced how much they buy while 45 percent have ceased purchasing from brands they deem unethical or lacking in the sustainability sector.

Furthermore, a hospitality survey discovered that 83 percent of participants expect hospitality businesses to do their part in sustainable practices. Also, 80 percent of respondents said sustainability is a major deciding factor when they choose where to go for food. In the future, this statistic will probably increase as public awareness of climate change also increases—particularly among Generation Z.

As such, sustainable restaurants are no longer just a ‘bonus;’ they’re a necessity for satisfying customers. With pressure from both climate change and sustainability-geared younger generations, businesses operating in the hospitality industry must now focus on sustainable and ethical practices more than ever before.

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