Holistic advisory tool to evaluate and enhance sustainable food procurement practices in professional kitchens

Societal-wide transformation of our food system is necessary to secure sustainable food for the future. Such a large-scale transformation requires pulling equally large levers of change. Food procurement offers one such lever as it is an aggregator of food demand for the masses. In order to measure food procurement, an all-encompassing interpretation of a sustainable meal is needed to account for all social, economic and environmental variables. In addition, professional kitchens and procurement officers alike need to be equipped with holistic tools and simple outputs for communicating sustainable progress. This study outlines the development of a holistic advisory tool that is co-created together with stakeholder feedback and industry experts. The tool is a cloud service built with open source tools that rely on indicators focused on the biosphere base of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDG) Wedding Cake Framework. Potential indicators are screened using a novel interpretation of SMART criteria, the SMARTc Food Procurement Indicator Selection Criteria to ensure outputs are easy to estimate based on current data, can be achieved within current budgets and are easily communicable in the fast-paced gastronomy sector. While there is no literary consensus on the best food procurement variables, nor how to measure them, the holistic advisory tool focuses on Plant-Meat-Dairy Ratio, organic percentage, carbon footprint and seasonality. Moreover, in the absence of industry standards, such a comprehensive tool offers the possibility to measure and compare sustainable food procurement to planetary health diet recommendations and between professional kitchens themselves. Preliminary results are positive, however further development is needed to improve precision, comparability and interpretability. The ongoing development and widespread application of this tool will aid the process of procuring sustainable food while simultaneously contributing to measurable transformation of the food system.