4 Effective Ways to Make Your Hospitality Venue More Ethical

Hospitality, this industry we love, has always prided itself on a sense of ethics, whether its welcoming people into a collective house of communion or pioneering modern sustainability and ethical practices.

With 2018 set to be rife with mindfulness, and with recent calls for hospitality to hire more unemployed young people, we thought we’d share some practical ways that hospitality venues can become more ethical and socially conscious.

Be Inclusive with Your Hiring Policy

Hospitality venues can be as hospitable to their staff as their customers by implementing an inclusive hiring policy. It’s not about changing your entire business model but more about potentially hiring from alternative avenues.

A radical example is Jamie Oliver’s social enterprise restaurant Fifteen. In the early noughties, he gave a group of underprivileged youths in London – many with criminal records – the chance to train in hospitality. Some proclaimed it ‘a recipe for success’, and the apprentices have gone on to win awards and hold down great jobs.

These training cafés and restaurants exist In Australia too. The New Leaf Cafés in Newport & Footscray or Streat in Melbourne are great social enterprise training cafes aimed at tackling youth homelessness by offering a supported pathway to a sustainable livelihood.

There’s also a 6-month course called Nourish, run by amazing food rescue charity OzHarvest, which trains disadvantaged youths about different aspects of the industry. Get in touch with them and see if they have any great talent eager for some experience.

Source Quality Produce for Your Café or Restaurant

An effective way to be ethical is to source local, ethical and/or organic produce, which can improve the quality of your food and beverages and make your venue more environmentally friendly and sustainable by:

• lowering your carbon footprint
• promoting a variety of ingredients
• supporting your local economy
• creating a sense of community

If you’re a café, consider using coffee beans that contribute to the social, economic and environmental sustainability of coffee production at their origin. Get to know the grassroot farmers like Impos client Toby’s Estate, which builds life-changing relationships with the locals and promotes them with information cards in their cafes (pictured below).

Or there’s fellow Impos client Grumpy’s Green, a bar in Fitzroy, which reduces its carbon footprint by sourcing all its beer and wine from Victoria, and nearly all its spirits from Australia. Their list then notes how many kilometres each bottle has travelled.

With people being more aware of what they’re eating than ever before, promoting your hospitality venue as such can really reap benefits and stand you in good stead over the competition.