Regenerative foodservice: from soil health to menu design
Carlos Martin-Rios reframes foodservice as a powerful lever for regeneration, shifting the focus from “less harm” to actively improving soil health, water cycles, biodiversity, and community resilience. He shows how procurement, menu design, pricing, and kitchen operations can be redesigned around regenerative agriculture and outcome-based measurement, turning restaurants and hotels into stewards of living food systems rather than endpoints of...
Regeneration is not a rebranding of sustainability. It shifts the starting point. Instead of asking how to reduce harm, it asks whether our actions improve the vitality of the living systems on which we depend. In food systems, this means restoring soil health, strengthening water cycles and supporting biodiversity while reinforcing community resilience. For foodservice, the implications are equally concrete: procurement, menus, pricing and operations must be redesigned so that value creation supports ecological and social renewal rather than contributing to gradual depletion.
The intellectual roots of regenerative thinking lie in systems ecology, ecological economics and regenerative design. Systems ecology reframed nature as dynamic flows of energy and materials rather than static stocks. Ecological economics highlighted how markets fail to account for soil degradation, water depletion and biodiversity loss, treating them as externalities instead of real costs. Regenerative design translated these insights into practice by asking how systems can be configured so that each use contributes to the integrity of the larger system that sustains it.
The Hotel Yearbook 2026 - Sustainability Edition
The HYB 2026 The Regenerative Question: What Hospitality Must Become tackles regenerative hospitality's fundamental tensions. Moving beyond sustainability buzzwords, contributors will explore three perspectives: purists advocating holistic living-systems approaches; realists demanding measurable frameworks for accountability and scalability; and strategists seeking pragmatic balance between transformation and implementation. This edition serves as a critical forum to interrogate the divides, identify synergies, and define actionable pathways forward. By convening industry experts, researchers, and entrepreneurs, we transform contested concepts into constructive dialogue and, ultimately, clarifying what regenerative hospitality authentically is and isn't.