LANDLORD-TENANT ENGAGEMENT PROGRAMME: RICARDO CHANETON, MONO

By Samantha Lees

When it comes to tackling sustainability challenges in the food industry, landlord engagement might not be the first thing that comes to mind for most. Yet here at Food Made Good, we’ve been working with Henderson Land Group, one of the largest real estate developers in Hong Kong, on designing and delivering the bespoke Landlord-Tenant Engagement Programme to enable their tenants to explore and implement new sustainability initiatives.

We spoke to Ricardo Moneton, the award-winning chef and founder of the highly-acclaimed restaurant MONO, one of the participating tenants of the programme, about his thoughts on the programme and about sustainability in Hong Kong.

SUSTAINABILITY HAS BECOME A FASHION, EVERYONE TALKS ABOUT IT BUT NO ONE REALLY KNOWS HOW IT IS EXECUTED

Why is sustainability important to you and to Mono?

“We try and do our part and do what we think is the right thing to do in our little restaurant. Hong Kong is a challenging environment because we import nearly everything, and people’s living standards are high, for example they have air-conditioning everywhere. But we try to work with certain people that are hands-on solving sustainability issues around the world. One of those is ZeroFoodprint. They work with small farming communities which (help restaurants) reduce their carbon footprint. How it works is we charge a 1% donation of our (customers’) bills which goes to ZeroFoodprint to offset carbon emissions in the restaurant’s operations.”

“We also try to do our own things, like consume less water, turn off the air-conditioning in the colder months in Hong Kong; and if we can find farms that operate organically and sustainably then we try purchasing from them as much as possible.”

In fact, sustainability has been a key pillar since the beginning of MONO. They constantly looked for ways to use recycled materials when building the restaurant, source MSC-certified seafood, work with a local farm for herbs, and use the Nordaq tap filtration system instead of purchasing bottled water.

Why did you decide to join the Landlord-Tenant Engagement Programme?

“I think it’s a great initiative for a real estate developer to make the call to create awareness by doing this programme with all their tenants. And especially coming from a giant real estate developer, it is very impressive.”

“I hope they won’t just stop here but will keep working with organisations like Food Made Good to push their tenants to do better in their sustainability efforts and in taking care of the environment.”