Breaking the Chain to Save It: How Asia’s Hospitality Can Fix Food Systems
Ngalung Kalla in Sumba, Indonesia
Asia’s hospitality industry is facing a culinary crisis. Climate change threatens staple crops, global supply chains remain unstable and expensive, and rising guest expectations are adding pressure. These combined challenges demand urgent solutions.
In a nutshell, the way Asia eats and how hotels and restaurants serve food must change.
At the recent AST webinar, Breaking the Chain to Save It: How Asia’s Hospitality Can Fix Food Systems, three leaders showed what change looks like on the ground:
Peggy Chan, Executive Director, Zero Foodprint Asia (ZFPA)
Bjorn Low, Co-founder & Chief Urban Farmer, Edible Garden City
Their message was clear. To help create more sustainable food systems, the hospitality industry must address both ends of the chain: upstream and downstream.
Upstream focuses on food production: what we grow and how we grow it. Downstream is about processing and consumption: how food is transported, packaged, and served, and managed to minimize waste. Both ends must work together, driven by collaboration, data-backed metrics, and guest experiences that build trust and transparency.
What’s At Stake
Food production drives roughly a quarter of global greenhouse gas emissions, and the vast majority – over 80% comes from upstream activities such as land use, crop production, livestock, and fisheries rather than downstream activities including transport and packaging. That breakdown matters for hotels:
Upstream leverage: Shift demand toward regenerative, low-input crops and better livestock practices; direct capital into farmers’ soil-health transitions.
Downstream leverage: Shorten supply lines, localize supply where sensible, and slash waste with menu design and operational discipline.
In other words: Food menus, sourcing, and waste are tools to reduce climate impact.
Three Field-Tested Shifts You Can Implement Today
Replace “more” with “better” choices to spotlight local produce and avoid waste.
What we heard: Andrew and his team adopted fixed or smaller menus, which lowered over-ordering, simplified preparation, and let the kitchen highlight local, seasonal produce. Guests eventually embraced the shift. They trusted the kitchen and enjoyed being “relieved” from scanning long menus. It is proof that better choices, not more choices, can reduce waste without diminishing the dining experience.
Why it works: In hospitality, waste is often a design failure disguised as abundance. By replacing excess variety with focused, seasonal options, hotels can reduce spoilage, elevate the quality of ingredients, and celebrate local surpluses (e.g., turning peak-season mulberries into jam or ice cream).
Team play: Front-of-house staff need simple scripts to explain the “why” behind shorter menus. Marketing reframes “limited choice” as a chef-led tasting journey that spotlights regional ingredients. Finance tracks the gains by linking lower waste to real cost improvements. As our recent “Sustainability Beyond the Manager: Engaging Your Entire Team” webinar shows, transformation lasts only when every department plays its part.
Consider these actions today.
Retire your buffet, or set a firm timeline and plan to do so.
Pilot a two or three-course set menu at lunch for 60 days, measure prep waste and plate returns weekly, and scale what works.Train guest-facing teams with an effective narrative: “We design menus around the best of this week’s harvest. You’ll eat fresher, waste less, and discover the stories behind your food.”
2. Make food producers - farmers and fishermen – part of your brand, without greenwashing.
What we heard: Andrew and his team acquired a 7-hectare permaculture farm that now supplies eggs, chicken, fruit, and vegetables; they feed chickens with black soldier fly larvae grown from kitchen scraps to close loops. Costs are higher than buying conventionally, but quality is unmistakably better, and guest loyalty is rising. On the property, small kitchen gardens and chicken coops deepen the connection (kids love collecting eggs). At the same time, a new boat-to-table experience brings guests face-to-face with the fishermen who supply the catch and the chef who turns it into the day’s meal.
Why it works: Beyond provenance, guests want connections and stories. When they meet farmers or fishers, the story becomes tactile and memorable. That builds pricing power and loyalty even when profit margins on the ingredients are thinner.
The guardrail: As Bjorn emphasized, don’t overclaim. An urban hotel farm alone will likely not be enough to feed the entire property. It is best positioned as guest engagement and skills hubs, not food supply or carbon panaceas.
Consider these actions today.
If you have land within 10–30 km: scope a micro-supply farm in partnership with a local grower; start with one product you can repeatedly feature (e.g., eggs).
If you’re an urban hotel, convert an ornamental space into a productive edible landscape with native plants (e.g., winged beans, moringa, edible flowers), and tie it to hands-on guest activities (garden-to-bar, harvest-to-plate classes).
Build a farmer-meet-the-guest moment: a brief pre-dinner “provenance chat” or a short farm reel on your QR menu.
A new kids club initiative brings the kids ‘behind the scenes’ of the island so that they can learn about how the resort operates. Photos by Nikoi Island.
3. Allocate more money upstream: ZFPA’s 1% pledge funds soil health improvement.
What we heard: Zero Foodprint Asia channels the 1% added to diners’ bills from participating restaurants/hotels into a grant pool that supports farmers in transitioning to regenerative practices. Since 2021, ZFPA has onboarded over 100 partners and granted HKD 5.8 million (or USD 754,000) across 26 farming projects, with an additional 10 projects this year.
Early results from the Astungkara Way project after four crop cycles are striking:
Input costs down by 39% (less chemical fertilizer)
Labor costs decreased by 12% (ducks used for weeding and pest control)
Net farm profit increased by 31%
Yield stability maintained (seed/yield change minimal but trending positive)
At the portfolio level, ZFPA continues to fund hundreds of farmers to transform and restore thousands of acres of degraded land not by philanthropy, but through many small transactions done transparently at the point of dining.
Why it works: Hotels often shoulder the optics of sustainability while farmers carry the risk. A dedicated, auditable funding loop aligns stories, science, and systems: guests co-invest, farmers transition, operators gain differentiated provenance, and everyone gets healthier soils.
Consider these actions today:
If you’re a ZFPA’s 1% pledge partner, use a plain-language explainer. For example, “this partnership helps farmers adopt regenerative practices, and results are audited and reported annually.”
Earmark part of your events/catering revenue to match guest contributions
Insist on monitoring, reporting, and verification (MRV): soil carbon sequestration, biodiversity indicators, pesticide reduction, and farmer profit shifts.
Photos by Astungkara Way.
Urban Farming, Reframed
Bjorn’s team has installed food production across Singapore’s built environment for 13 years, from the Parkroyal Collection properties to a community farm 10 minutes from Orchard Road that supplies over 80 restaurants weekly with high-value items such as microgreens and edible flowers.
The candid truth: urban farms won’t solve food poverty, but they can:
De-risk supply for niche, high-value items that chefs struggle to source consistently.
Educate and delight guests with harvest-to-plate activities.
Rewild landscapes via food forests and syntropic plantings that restore pollinators and soil life.
Close loops by taking digestate and compost back into the soil.
Takeaway: Urban rooftop farms cannot replace rural fields, but they serve as valuable spaces for engagement, ecology, and innovation. They inspire chefs, educate guests, and create deeper connections to food systems.
Rethink ROI: From Unit Costs to Systems Value
The panelists were frank: small island or urban farms could cost more on a per-unit basis than wholesale purchase. So how does this pencil out?
Waste prevention: Smaller and fixed menus and no buffets translate to less food spoilage and tighter supplier-kitchen synchronicity.
Brand affinity: Seasonal dining, supplier stories, and participatory experiences justify pricing and repeat bookings.
Risk management: Partial self-supply plus hyperlocal partners can buffer disruptions and volatility.
Portfolio-level impact: The 1% pledge channels money where the fight against carbon emissions matters most – land use, and by turning sustainability into a funded transition, not a marketing claim.
Andrew cautioned against fanciful metrics that are hard to validate; hence, focus on measuring what matters. Pick fewer, sturdier KPIs you can audit and iterate, for example:
Food waste intensity: kg of kitchen waste per cover avoided weekly.
Menu efficiency: number of SKUs vs. covers, and food surplus reuse rate
Locality: % of items served that have been grown or caught within 10 km
Farmer transition funding: amount of money pledged and disbursed, hectares of farm supported for regenerative practices
Guest engagement: activity participation rates
These indicators bridge various departments, from culinary and procurement to finance, guest engagement, and marketing. They also make it easier to align incentives such as recognition tied to waste cuts, storytelling tied to verified impact, etc.
That was also precisely the spirit that “Sustainability Beyond the Manager: Engaging Your Entire Team” webinar encouraged to instill at your organization, which was to build cross-functional ownership so sustainability is embedded in how the hotel is run.
→ Check out the AST How to Engage Your Entire Team guide.
Photos by Edible Garden City.
Five Myths The Panel Helped Busted
“Buffets are a guest expectation.” They’re a habit. When offered a well-explained, chef’s set menu, guests often prefer the experience, and waste plummets.
“Local farms must reduce procurement costs.” Not necessarily. The value comes via quality, brand differentiation, resilience, and storytelling.
“Urban farms fix food security.” They fix engagement and biodiversity first, supply niche ingredients second. That’s still valuable.
“Sustainability is a procurement problem.” It’s a whole-property system: menu design, guest communication, staff training, housekeeping (including composting), engineering (using digesters), finance, and marketing (claims discipline).
“Farm partnerships are PR.” Not when guests can meet a fishman, walk through a garden, or watch ducks weeding a rice field. These encounters can be powerful and genuine connections that create lasting memories for guests.
A Brief 4-Step Action Plan for Hotels and F&B Companies
Step 1: Align the house
Appoint a cross-functional task force (GM, Executive Chef, Procurement, Finance, Marketing, Sustainability, FOH). Meet weekly.
Pick three KPIs to start: waste per cover, % of items within 10 km, and 1% funds raised.
Map one ornamental-to-edible site and one producer relationship you can activate.
Step 2: Redesign the experience
Pilot a set lunch or a trimmed dinner menu.
Add a “harvest course” that matches with supply.
Write simple guest scripts and staff micro-trainings that link experience to impact.
If you’re in an urban setting, install an edible patch and schedule menu activations (e.g., herb-infused cocktails).
Step 3: Close loops & fund soil regeneration.
Set up a waste sorting and tracking routine with weekly dashboards.
Start a compost or digester loop and move outputs to landscaped beds.
Launch the 1% pledge with ZFPA, or a similar program to support soil health regeneration, and collect impact farmer stories to share.
Step 4: Measure, market, and mature
Publish a one-page impact note such as X% waste reduced, Y% of food sourced within 10 km, $Z financed regenerative farmers.
Film reels of producer/chef/guest moments for marketing purposes.
Place QR codes on menus to allow guests to watch them and leave their own comments upon completing the experience.
Continue innovating the fixed or seasonal menu approach.
Rapid-Fire Wisdom from the Frontline
On menu change: Cut industrially farmed livestock; shrink menus; lean into climate-smart, native crops that thrive with fewer inputs.
On the “one metric” to standardize: Waste per cover is simple and high-impact; locality (% within 10 km) is clear and motivating; upstream metrics (acres transitioned, farmers funded, soil carbon) keep the system honest.
On partnerships: Pair farmers and fishers directly with chefs; build tri-sector collaborations across hoteliers, growers, and researchers to ground claims in science.
On tomorrow’s single action: Reduce your menu (and retire buffet lines); stop working in silos; adopt one edible landscape on site.
The Bigger Picture: Culture Eats Sustainability for Breakfast
Tools and pilots matter, but it’s the culture that keeps impact growing.
The most successful properties treat sustainability like service quality: everyone’s job, every day.
That means embedding responsibility, creativity, and measurement into the routines of all departments, from revenue managers and housekeepers to chefs and landscapers. It also means marketing what you can verify, and inviting guests to participate in your story.
Breaking the chain doesn’t mean severing ties with culinary heritage; it means reinventing them so that chefs, farmers, fishers, and travelers can all thrive on the same time.
