This week we gathered a group of Hong Kong’s foodservice sites to launch a groundbreaking programme with the support of Henderson Land Group, who are leading the way by enabling their F&B tenants to drive new sustainability initiatives across their businesses.
Here at Food Made Good, we are true believers in the power of collaboration. Our membership model encapsulates this as we enable a wide mix of businesses to work together, share insights, learnings and opportunities amongst a network of like-minded businesses through our events and community. Beyond our membership, in order for us to achieve our mission of creating a more sustainable food system, we recognise that we need to be engaging with not just the individual restaurant site members, but in addition a wide variety of stakeholders, such as NGOs, government and the private sector – one of which being landlords.
Since November 2020 Food Made Good has been working with Henderson Land Group. This began when the developer was the headline sponsor for the inaugural Food Made Good Awards, as we recognised the best in sustainable dining in Hong Kong.
Over the past few months, our work has evolved to provide support to the tenants across the Henderson portfolio. Together with Henderson Land, we have designed and begun the delivery of a bespoke Landlord-Tenant Engagement Programme where the landlord enables their tenants to explore and implement new sustainability initiatives. We started by exploring the materiality issues which Henderson Land are focussing on in their sustainability strategy and overlayed this with our sustainability framework in order to produce a bespoke programme for delivery. We have on-boarded a number of tenants to take part in the project and have delivered a ‘Sustainability 101’ workshop, outlining the key issues the foodservice sector faces and how they can each play their part.
It was refreshing for us to hear one participating tenant on their sustainability journey comment ‘It’s eye-opening for me to be part of a programme like this and explore how we can work across each of these areas’.
Next month we will conduct audits across each of the sites and analyse the data at an individual site level as well as a group level, to explore what the trends are. What practices are the tenants exceeding in? Where are there opportunities for improvement across the board? Once we have this analysis we’ll work with them to execute action plans and drive forward their food visions.
It’s exciting for us to see a landlord taking such proactive steps to benchmark their tenants’ sustainability practices, and provide on the ground solutions to support them, which will ultimately reduce their environmental impact, increase their social impact whilst identifying cost-saving opportunities.
Please do watch this space for further updates as the programme progresses over the next few months. Big thanks to WWF-Hong Kong for supporting us with their beautiful space, the Central Sustainable Living Hub.
