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Getting Your Green Card For Jose Duarte, it wasn’t enough to run a successful Italian-Peruvian fusion restaurant in Boston’s North End. He was reading about climate change, and he wanted to do something about it. In 2007, he applied to get his eatery, Taranta, certified by the Green Restaurant Association. The Boston-based GRA awards the label "Certified Green Restaurant" to establishments that undergo an audit and score high on a list of eco-friendly practices. It’s been certifying since 1990, but its roster has tripled the past two years, to over 300 units. In April, a second nonprofit began offering a green label for foodservice. Green Seal of Washington, DC, which has rated products and services since 1989, launched its own set of restaurant standards. No restaurants have been certified yet, though several are in the process.
Green labels don’t come cheap. The right to use the logo can run anywhere from $300 up to $4,500, depending on how much help you need to bring your operation up to standards. Are the returns worth the investment? Proponents say the labels give restaurants a marketing edge, as consumers grow more leery of “greenwashing,” making false or deceptive environmental claims. Another benefit is organizational know-how. To get Taranta certified, a GRA consultant inspected its operations and presented a laundry list of suggestions. Duarte implemented a dozen his first year, from compact-fluorescent light bulbs to a recycling and composting program. Not all restaurateurs think the labels are worth the expense, though. Pizza Fusion of Ft. Lauderdale, Florida, which boasts a largely organic menu and delivers from its 19 units in hybrid cars, looked into getting GRA-certified, but it balked at the $5,000 fee. Another concern is the growing number of green labels out there. Only two organizations certify restaurants, but the food they serve may be certified by dozens of groups. The result is that consumers need help sorting through labels, says Dr. Urvashi Rangan of the Consumers Union in Yonkers, New York. She runs the Web site Greener Choices, which rates 150 green labels on a scale from “not meaningful” to “highly meaningful.” In general, she says, the most meaningful labels are bestowed by third-party certifiers, like the GRA and Green Seal. “Certified claims have more credibility, if they’re made by organizations with independent verification arms.” Excerpted from Restaurant Business, January 2010 Related Articles:
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