Abstract
Every diet has an impact on an individual’s health status, the environment, as well as on social concerns. A growing number of meals are consumed in the out-of-home catering sector, in which a systematic sustainability assessment is not part of common practice. In order to close this gap, an instrument was developed as part of the NAHGAST project. After more than one year of using the NAHGAST online tool, it needs to be assessed what positive environmental influences can be realized by using the tool. For this reason, this article deals with the question of whether an online tool can enable stakeholders from the out-of-home consumption sector to revise their meals with regard to aspects of a sustainable diet. In addition, it will be answered how precise recipe revisions of the most popular lunchtime meals influence the material footprint as well as the carbon footprint. In conclusion, an online tool can illustrate individual sustainability paths for stakeholders in the out-of-home consumption sector and enables an independent recipe revision for already existing meals. The results show that even slight changes in recipes could lead to savings of up to a third in carbon footprint as well as in material footprint. In relation to the out-of-home consumption sector, this results in the potential for substantial multiplication effects that will pave the way for the dissemination of sustainable nutrition.
Highlights
A sustainable diet consists of four fundamental dimensions: nutrition, economics, society and environment [1]
This article deals with the question of whether an online tool can enable stakeholders from the out-of-home consumption sector to revise their meals with regard to aspects of a sustainable diet
The results show that even slight changes in recipes could lead to savings of up to a third in carbon footprint as well as in material footprint
Summary
A sustainable diet consists of four fundamental dimensions: nutrition, economics, society and environment [1]. Is it advisable to consider these dimensions simultaneously [2], it can be advantageous as, by the current state of scientific knowledge, a resource-efficient diet is often a healthier one [3,4,5,6,7,8]. Meat-reduced diets [9,10,11,12] for example, have a lower environmental impact since plant-based diets hold an ecological reduction potential of about 20%–30% compared to an omnivore diet [13,14,15]. Stakeholders in out-of-home catering, have to face the challenge of putting meals together in a way that takes all fundamental factors of a sustainable diet into account [21,22,23,24]
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