Rare Restaurants, which owns the Gaucho and M brands, is today exclusively serve carbon-neutral beef across all venues for Earth Day, over two years ahead of their original 2025 target for reaching this milestone.
Following an extensive two-year project managed by scientists and agronomists at the Carbon Group Agro-Climatic Solutions, Rare Restaurants has calculated the carbon footprint of all beef for its restaurants from farm to table. The results of this project show an average carbon footprint of 15.80kg CO2eq per kilogram of beef purchased.
Ongoing work to reduce carbon emissions at source and in transportation continues with Rare Restaurants’ partner farms in Argentina. Remaining carbon emissions are 100% neutralised through a series of reforestation projects in the UK and South America as part of the company’s ongoing partnership with Not For Sale.
Not For Sale creates long-term, sustainable, scalable solutions to break the cycle of modern-day slavery and sex trafficking on reforestation projects in the Amazon, which in turn will offset the methane and greenhouse gas emissions of the beef production for Gaucho and M Restaurants.
To date, Rare Restaurants has funded the planting of over 4,000 trees across six projects in Peru and Brazil, with a total offsetting potential of 1,464 tonnes of carbon. They have now invested in further projects to offset the carbon footprint of their beef for the whole of 2022 and every year thereafter, two years ahead of schedule in the company’s roadmap to carbon net zero, which is managed by Impact Manager Alyson Parkes.
To reinforce its commitment to sustainability, Gaucho is launching a Sustainable Supper Club series at the flagship Charlotte Street site. Each of the monthly events will showcase a different element that contributes to making a restaurant wholly sustainable. The successes trialled by the Sustainable Supper Club project will be rolled out in all venues and will form an integral part of the group’s target of reaching carbon net zero by 2030.
CEO Martin Williams commented, “We are thrilled to offer carbon-neutral beef to all diners over two years ahead of target, as part of our journey to the restaurants having net zero carbon emissions by 2030.
'Since launching the UK’s first carbon-neutral steak restaurant with Gaucho Charlotte Street in 2019, we have invested heavily in projects to calculate and reduce our carbon emissions.
'We look forward to developing this work over the coming years, with sustainability at the forefront of our minds as Rare Restaurants moves into a period of sustained growth in both new openings and the existing estate.”