Search

×

Hotels use buying power to make sustainable change

You won’t see a lavish breakfast spread at MOB Hotel of the People.

“I am very skeptical of brunches and huge buffets, which are instruments of unimaginable waste,” says founder Cyril Aouizerate, co-founder of Mama Shelter hotels and former Sorbonne professor. MOB, his new concept announced late last year, intends to network with local, organic agricultural cooperatives and limit its menu to a handful of seasonal options.

That will make food costs about 10% to 15% above average and prices to customers about 10% to 20% higher, Aouizerate says.

Many hotel companies aren’t looking simply at the cost of sustainably produced, responsibly raised produce and other food – they are using their buying power to reshape the entire chain, demanding that their suppliers meet ethical criteria and minimize packaging, and making sure guests know that a luxury experience can be delicious – and, in the case of some resorts, an opportunity to choose your own freshly laid eggs.

They are also redefining the business. MOB, which aims to develop and manage eight hotels in the U.S. and Europe over the next half-dozen years, calls itself not a hotel chain but an “ethical cooperative moment.”

“Our goal is to defend a sustainable food chain, without dogma or ideology,” Aouizerate says. As for cost, “simplicity guarantees both the safeguarding of the planet and the maintenance of low prices, allowing a social mix within the establishment,” he says. “We need to learn to eat more responsibly.”

By the numbers

It’s tough to talk about costs in hotel F&B because aspects such as water, waste disposal and energy usage are often entwined within a property’s total expenses. What guests actually see on their plates is another matter. Hotel companies often are willing to pay a premium for positive PR, and guests want the satisfaction of ordering responsibly raised and grown entrees. Cost can be measured in reputation, too, says Eric Ricaurte, founder and CEO of Greenview, a Singapore-based sustainability consulting and research firm.

“In the F&B world, there’s a risk that you could get called out for shrimp that’s farmed using child labor or for dynamiting fish,” says Ricaurte, a founder of the HOT Coalition, a community of so far mostly Asia-based hotel owners who have signed on to take and measure energy- and resource-saving steps that can lead to quantifiable cost savings.

Competitive advantage

It’s a philosophy that Six Senses Hotels Resorts Spas pioneered. “It’s not about saving money in the kitchen,” says Jeffery Smith, the Thailand-based company’s director of sustainability. “Sustainability is our competitive advantage.”

Part of Six Senses’ responsible F&B purchasing includes buying food produced locally whenever possible and keeping packaging to a minimum or reusable. It limits suppliers to those who agree. For many Six Senses resorts, growing organic vegetables and raising chickens and goats means the supply chain is as short as the walk to the garden.

“The cost of shipping cabbages to the Maldives is huge,” he notes. “For us, local sourcing and self-producing food – there’s probably a better return on investment than most for us because most of our resorts are quite remote.”

That includes Energy Star-rated kitchen appliances and building relationships with local fishermen, which Six Senses Laamu Hotel in the Maldives polices and supports at the same time: It promises to buy an entire catch if it meets sustainable criteria. As a result, Smith says, bycatch – capturing fish of the wrong species along with the regular catch – has effectively been eliminated.

So have plastic bottles. Six Senses’ bottling facilities provide filtered, mineralized water on site. The high initial capital cost pays off in the long term. “Sustainably managing your supply chain makes sense,” he says.

Wasteful packaging winds up costing the company on the back end at disposal. “You need the highest-quality foods for your guests,” he says, “so there’s not always that many suppliers to choose from. That’s a challenge for the whole industry.”

?“Twenty years ago, when we started bottling our own water, it was revolutionary,” says Jeffery Smith, Six Senses Hotels Resorts Spas’ director of sustainability. The company built water-bottling facilities on its resort premises, including the Six Senses Laamu in the Maldives (above) – a high initial investment that pays off in eliminating what Smith estimates is hundreds of thousands of plastic bottles. “Sustainability is part of the product that we believe our guests want.”
?“Twenty years ago, when we started bottling our own water, it was revolutionary,” says Jeffery Smith, Six Senses Hotels Resorts Spas’ director of sustainability. The company built water-bottling facilities on its resort premises, including the Six Senses Laamu in the Maldives (above) – a high initial investment that pays off in eliminating what Smith estimates is hundreds of thousands of plastic bottles. “Sustainability is part of the product that we believe our guests want.”
Putting a seal on a bottle of water at Six Senses Laamu
Putting a seal on a bottle of water at Six Senses Laamu

Start small

Maxime Verstraete, Hilton Worldwide’s vice president of corporate responsibility and ADA compliance, says the company uses its buying power to work with farmers and manufacturers and starts with the end in mind.

“It could be having one, two or three hotels starting a program,  and then growing, perhaps on sourcing,” Verstraete says. “The more hotels we put on a program, the less the financial impact because we are able to lower the product cost.”

Case in point: a company in Texas that sustainably and responsibly farms shrimp, but couldn’t support demand from multiple properties. “I was all excited about it,” says Marc Ehrler, Hilton’s vice president of culinary, Americas, and an award-winning chef himself. So last year one property, the Hilton Houston Americas, bought the farm’s shrimp. “We were able to help them grow. We are helping them develop,” he says. “It’s never going to be a national program, but we can get to a regional program.”

And the cost? Like most companies interviewed for this story, Hilton declines to get into specifics. Because it’s local, the premium isn’t high, Ehrler says, and the quality can be better.

“What we’re finding is that you can make the transition at a similar cost or a minimal premium,” Verstaete adds. 

Managing supply

The Hilton Singapore was the first hotel in Asia to receive MSC and Aquaculture Stewardship Council certifications for its seafood offerings. At that property, “we found that we were ordering over a hundred SKUs of seafood alone in different products,” Verstraete says. “So in looking into responsibly sourced seafood, you become more efficient in your sourcing, and that brings in savings. We were ordering probably six different kinds of shrimp.”

And while change must happen at the property level, Ehrler says, it can be mandated at the corporate level, and the focus placed on reducing waste at the point of purchase or in the kitchen, by managing production.

Hilton launched a goal in mid-2016 to responsibly source 100% of its total volume of seafood at owner-managed hotels. Pilots to minimize food waste have been launched on several continents that will be scaled up this year to focus on issues like separation and composting, disposal and donation. “Once you measure it, you can manage it,” Verstaete says. “Going into a chef’s kitchen and suggesting things is not always easy,… but you’re going to find ways to better source and prepare, and at the end of the day it’s going to drive your food costs down.”

“When you think about suppliers and vendors,” he adds, “we really work together to try and solve these issues. We’re not going to solve them by ourselves… We have a responsible sourcing policy that we share with our suppliers and we expect them to abide by it. It’s in everybody’s best interest.”

Comment