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For a long time now, M Restaurants and indeed the entire Rare Restaurants group has been conscious of our social and environmental impact on the planet, people and community. In 2015 we partnered up with ‘Not For Sale’ a movement which seeks to fight modern-day slavery. Since then, our list of charity partners has grown exponentially and today we’re proud partners of five outstanding organisations including ‘Only A Pavement Away’, ‘The Right Course’, ‘School of Hard Knocks’ and ‘Hospitality Action’. Our drive to become a sustainable business has only increased over the years and is now an integral part of the company’s values and its future. In 2021 we hired our first Impact Manager Alyson Parkes, who studied Environmental Sustainability at university, later taking on a position with the Sustainable Restaurant Association and managing an environmental project for Linklaters, before returning to study at the university founded by the ‘Slow Food Movement’. Alyson is working closely with the ‘Carbon Group’, ‘Net Zero Now’, the ‘Zero Carbon Forum’ and Martin Williams our CEO, steering our environmental strategy to set out and achieve these long-term goals:
Become a net zero carbon emissions business by 2030
In the interim, address the environmental impact of our Black Angus cattle in Argentina by:
Reducing the carbon emissions from beef production in our partner farms and offsetting the remaining emissions by 2025
Offsetting the carbon emissions of one cut of beef in 2022, so that we can offer a carbon neutral steak option at each restaurant.
“The road to sustainable beef production is challenging and can only be successful through collaboration” – Alyson (2022).
We began by undertaking a project to better understand our carbon footprint of our beef, from birth and fattening at the farm level, to the emissions from transportation to restaurants. This tells us what offsetting is required to achieve carbon neutral status of our beef and ultimately identify opportunities to reduce emissions along the supply chain.
‘Not For Sale’ is a charity that works with local communities in South America to understand the root causes of modern slavery. They investigate local economies to discover where they might break the cycle of slavery by creating projects that provide education, empowerment, and income. Since 2015 we have raised over £300,000 for the movement including a company investment in their environmental reforestation projects which saw us fund the planting of over 4,000 trees in 2021 and contributed to our offsetting goals.
We’re proud of the work we’re doing and we hope that in addition to the work of ourselves and our suppliers, that you, our guests, will help us become a net zero business by 2030.
It’s a long roadmap to realising our dream of becoming an entirely carbon neutral restaurant group and we’re excited to do this in the right way and to share our journey with you through the impact blog series. Each month we’ll be keeping guests up to date with our progress and learnings.
