Monday 26 October 2009

Sustainable Restaurant Association


Seen End of the Line or part of Hugh Fearnly-Whittingstall’s Chicken Out campaign, interested in where your 12.5% service charge on your bill goes? Sustainability has never been such a powerful force in our decision making when deciding on how and where we would like to eat. Being a big fan of eating out and all things sustainable I was over the moon to start working on the Sustainable Restaurant Association a few months ago. Things have been moving fast and we are on our way to creating the UK’s first national association that aims to help restaurants take a holistic view of sustainability. Launching in February 2010 we have come across a host of positive and negative attitudes to trying to make UK hospitality global leaders in sustainability. Some seem to think it is too hard, too big, too many grey areas. Our response, if we have many restaurants doing the little things, getting involved and becoming knowledgeable about the impact they have on the environment and their community then all the better.

It is a confusing world of information out there, lots of groups, charities and associations trying to help in their own area. For your average restaurant owner or chef it is a minefield, what to go for, Rainforest Alliance, Fair Trade or local and seasonal? Through expert advice, forums, events, outside organisations and our website we will bring together the latest information and research that can be practically adapted to restaurants.

Getting out there and meeting restaurants such as Leon, Alimentum, Moro and Barrafina we have seen a real passion for great food, great service and an amazing atmosphere, it is with this obsession to detail, that we hope sustainability becomes an important agenda for customers and operators alike.

Monday 19 October 2009

You manage a brand. You have a product to promote. You sign up a celebrity. Simple. Or, if you prefer, you invent a character to promote your product (remember The Milky Bar Kid?). Easier to control, and less risk of him or her being photographed stumbling drunk out of Whisky Mist at 2 in the morning.

Or, if you're MTV, you take this idea and subvert it by creating a virtual celebrity to promote a cause rather than a product. So, welcome Cherry Girl. She aims to "show a lifestyle that is fun and fulfilling, and, as a by-product, happens to be sustainable", according to MTV's Head of Sustainability, Ian Jackson, whilst being "mischievous, rebellious, seductive, intriguing and hedonistic". So nothing like the Milky Bar Kid, then.

Building on MTV's Switch campaign, which communicates climate change messages through a variety of media, Cherry Girl inhabits a virtual world - through her blogs, tweets, MySpace page and Facebook profile. She extols the virtues of reusing and recycling (and cycling), and debates the issue of sustainable consumption, with a cool and slightly off-beat approach. All very web 2.0, with the emphasis firmly on dialogue and user involvement.


It feels like an inspired idea - it engages the MTV audience through channels they understand and use everyday, it does it in a way that feels inspiring, contemporary and thoughtful rather than preachy, and it aligns with existing activity that's already up and running. 2,136 Facebook friends may not be enough to change the world, but it's worth remembering that MTV's long running Staying Alive campaign, promoting safe sex messages to youth globally, reached 800 million homes - that's 64% of homes with a television. They know what they're doing, and you've got to respect them for trying.




Friday 9 October 2009

Bedtime story for sceptics

Interested to hear about this new advert from the Government’s Act on CO2 campaign, showing on primetime TV from today. The aim of the ad is to win over the remaining climate change sceptics (and persuade people of the immediacy and gravity of the challenge. It’s in direct response to some Department of Energy and Climate Change research showing that 52 per cent of people still don’t think climate change will significantly affect them. The ad itself – a bedtime story about a ‘very very strange world’ – is pretty sugary and ‘save the kids,’ but anything that helps to bring climate change from something abstract and futuristic that people think will never affect them, into something that people are moved to act on now, has my support.

Of course, it would be nice to think that we’d moved on from the argument on whether climate change is indeed a threat or not by now, towards actually doing something about it. Though from the somewhat crazed comments on the Times article (worth a read, if you find conspiracy theorists amusing), it looks like there’s still some way to go before the argument is won.