Can sustainability in gastronomy ever be truly objective?

What the end of the Green Michelin Star reveals about the future of sustainable kitchens

At a glance 

The bottom line: sustainability in foodservice can be measured, but not with a single symbol or score.

Key insights:

• The Green Michelin Star raised awareness but lacked standardised criteria, making it impossible to compare restaurants fairly

• The biggest sustainability impact in foodservice happens in canteens, hospitals, and universities, not fine dining

• Meaningful measurement requires looking beyond carbon: water use, land use, eutrophication, and resource depletion all tell a different story

  
  

In this article: Why the Green Michelin Star struggled, where real foodservice impact happens, and what a science-based alternative to sustainability labels looks like.

When Michelin introduced its Green Star, the ambition was clear: shine a light on restaurants doing something meaningful for the planet. For a few years it worked, putting sustainability firmly on the gastronomic agenda and celebrating chefs who embraced local sourcing, seasonal menus, plant-forward cooking, and low-waste kitchens.

Its quiet disappearance raises a harder question though. Can sustainability in foodservice actually be measured? And if so, by whom, and against what standard?

The honest answer is: partly.

Why sustainability is hard to reduce to a single metric

Some things can be quantified well enough. Carbon emissions, food waste, water consumption, the ratio of plant-based ingredients on a menu. Data tools and lifecycle analysis have made these increasingly tractable.

But a restaurant can source everything locally and still run an energy-intensive kitchen. It can go almost entirely plant-based while flying in ingredients from three continents. Or source locally and still offer a high proportion of high-impact beef dishes. One kitchen prioritises biodiversity and regenerative farming; another focuses on affordability. Neither is wrong, but they're not comparable either.

What the Green Star got right, and where it fell short

This is where the Green Star ran into trouble. It succeeded in making sustainability a mark of distinction for chefs, but the criteria behind it were never fully standardised or transparent. Restaurants were recognised for very different reasons: zero-waste operations, social impact, local sourcing, activism. The award was recognisable, but what it actually rewarded was never fully clear.

That's not a reason to dismiss the initiative. Fine dining sets the tone far beyond its own walls. Practices like seasonal cooking, fermentation, nose-to-tail, and a greater focus on vegetables have gained ground precisely because pioneering chefs made them desirable first. Fine dining rarely creates impact at scale, but it shapes what people want.

Where real foodservice impact happens

The largest measurable impact happens somewhere far less glamorous: corporate canteens, hospital kitchens, university cafeterias, school meal programmes, catering companies. These are the kitchens feeding thousands of people every day, where even marginal operational changes (a shift in protein sourcing, a reduction in food waste) translate into significant reductions in emissions and resource use. Sustainability here is less about inspiration and more about implementation.

Measuring what actually matters

At Ecotarian, we work with these large kitchens. We measure impact through a scientific framework built around 14 impact indicators that go beyond greenhouse gas emissions alone. These range from climate change and water impact to land impact, eutrophication, ecotoxicity, and resource depletion, mapped against planetary boundaries. The methodology uses lifecycle analysis across the full chain, from farm through processing, packaging, transport, and distribution, all the way to consumption.

The result is benchmarked against the average Belgian meal, giving kitchens a reference point that is grounded and local rather than abstract. A dish doesn't get a vague sustainability score. It gets a profile that shows where the impact actually sits, and where realistic improvement is possible.

It is not a perfect picture. Food waste and sourcing practices are not yet part of the calculation, and no methodology captures everything. But for sustainability managers and kitchen teams making decisions at scale, it offers a consistent, science-based framework for understanding trade-offs and tracking progress over time.

Beyond the label

The end of the Green Michelin Star probably isn't the end of sustainability in gastronomy. It might just be the end of the phase where a single symbol was supposed to do all the work. The more useful question was never "who is perfectly sustainable?" It's "how do we help kitchens make consistent, measurable progress and actually show it?"

Curious what your meal profile actually looks like? Contact us on info@ecotarian.eu today to request your demo.