PROVING HOW IT CAN BE DONE!
The Restaurant Lab is an innovation arena that examines how the restaurant industry can achieve Agenda 2030. To be able to answer that, we needed to be both theoretical and practical. The solution became a so called live-in-lab situated on the campus of KTH, Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm. In september 2019, The Restaurant Lab, Restauranglabbet in Swedish, opened it doors with 150 seats for lunch guests where we could measure, prototype and serve fantastic food!
The set-up was an experimental kitchen and innovation arena continuously measuring and monitoring effects and progress. It was important that test beds and iterations got immidiate feedback loops from real clients that ate and where willing to pay for the experimental meals, or in other ways interacted with the tests carried out in real life. The system focused on trimming key performance indicators (KPIs) for social, ecological and economic sustainability without compromising on quality and experience. The slogan became ”People, Planet, Profit, Pleasure towards Agenda 2030 by using Circular Design thinking”.
Restauranglabbet offered food all day, becoming an accessible arena for students and professi- onals to not only enjoy the food and beverages but also to create a open meeting place, a forum to discuss how sustainability can be achieved. Several famous brands and institutions placed their internal sustainability events at the test restaurant offering their colleagues a taste of tangible sustainability results. One of the event arenas is the dramatic setting of Sweden ́s first nuclear reactor R1.
Media quickly picked up, leading to numerous posts and articles in Sweden and abroad. They highlighted the concept and the tangible results: an average of 150 daily lunch guests, mainly staff such as PHD-students and professors from KTH, which in turn led to invitations to partici- pate in joint publicly funded research projects. Several famous organisation and companies such as Stockholm Resilence Center, Nordic Council of Ministers, Facebook and many more reached out to place their events and workshops, espacially when the focus was sustainabillity, Agenda 2030 and Circular Economy. At the same time the restaurant and food industry reco- gnised givning the The Restaurant Lab good rating on the food served. The goal for 2030 set by WWF to reduce from 2kg CO2/meal to 0.5kg / meal, the so called ”One Planet Plate”, was reached and surpassed, including fish and meat, within 2 months, averaging as low as 0,43 kg C02 /meal. The plate waste, ie how much the customers, left after finishing was extremely low, always in the single digits and at one point reaching 1.9%, which can be compared to an avera- ge in Sweden of 30-40% for buffets! Economically the restaurant also generated profit after 2 months.
We have gathered invaluable insights and data, our pre-study has been completed. We have thus closed our restaurant at KTH, after two years, to move forward into digitalisation, desicion support and other sectors, where we continuously encourage collaborations across industry boundaries, to jointly solve the global challenges that we face to balance people, planet, profit & pleasure!
We have seen THAT it works and now we also know HOW. Do you want to know more? Contact us at info@restauranglabbet.se
THE BRUTALIST KITCHEN
Photo cred: Pierre Björk
