Sustainable Restaurant Group (SRG) announced Thursday the completion and launch of its Carbon Calculator tool, which was created to determine the company’s carbon footprint and the offsets required to neutralize its affect on the environment. SRG began in 2008 with the goal of building the most innovative and creative restaurant group in America with an emphasis on being an environmentally focused to truly make an impact. The Carbon Calculator is the latest tool SRG is using to drive the conversation on sustainability in the industry.
The Carbon Calculator may be viewed here. Once on the site, consumers will dive into the world of SRG’s food supply chains, starting with where they source their sustainable seafood, following the ingredient path for its restaurants’ Bamboo Sushi, the world’s first certified-sustainable sushi restaurant, and QuickFish Poke Bar. Visitors to the site will learn more about the ingredient, where it’s found, its fishing practices, its earth impact and how it is transported to the restaurants. The carbon footprint of each item is shown along with industry standards that often point to SRG’s advance sustainability practices.
“When we started Sustainable Restaurant Group with the opening of Bamboo Sushi, our vision to create a sustainable version of the classic sushi restaurant was considered difficult to achieve by many of our industry peers,” says Kristofor Lofgren, founder and CEO, Sustainable Restaurant Group. “Now almost ten years later Bamboo Sushi is expanding into new markets and our commitment and relationship to the environment in deepened even further with the launch of our Carbon Calculator where we can now track to the ingredient the carbon offsets required that will continue to reduce are already low carbon footprint. At a time when the food industry has one of the largest carbon footprints, we now have a greater responsibility to make a difference.”
To offset carbon emissions, SRG partnered with the Ocean Foundation and its Seagrass Grow project to donate funds annually. Seagrass plays an integral role to the health of oceans providing food and habitat for juvenile marine species, protection from shoreline erosion, and filter pollution from water, among other benefits. Occupying just 0.1 percent of the seafloor, seagrass is responsible for 11% of the organic carbon buried in the ocean with Seagrass meadows capturing carbon at two to four times greater than tropical rainforests. Every dollar that Sustainable Restaurant Group gives to the Seagrass Grow project, SRG is offsetting 1.3 tons of carbon by planting 0.2 acres of seagrass. In 2017, SRG is responsible for planting 300.5 acres of seagrass.
To develop the website and data, SRG tapped Blue Star Integrative Studio to audit their supply chain, purveyor relationships and operational practices to ensure the findings of the Carbon Calculator are as detailed and accurate as possible. Blue Star gained insight from an outsider’s perspective from suppliers, employees and the SRG leadership team to see every operational aspect to provide the proper data. While the Carbon Calculator was meant for SRG’s own needs, it also was developed to set a new standard for the industry, serve as an inspiration point and also be easily replicated model that anyone in the industry can use to identify their own impact.
