Six Senses Hotels Resorts Spas

José Diogo Moreira

Community Trust Champion

Sustainably farmed”, “local”, “housemade”: these are beautiful words on a menu. Yet in many restaurants and bars today, guests are starting to quietly wonder whether they can still believe them. When every outlet claims to be sustainable and to work only with small, local producers, the result is not always trust. Sometimes, it is scepticism.

These terms have become buzzwords that attract attention for the wrong reasons. We should be concerned when every new modern restaurant or bar is “organic”, every coffee bean is “from small producers”, every wine is “low-intervention”, and all suppliers are supposedly local and certified, even in remote destinations where meaningful agriculture is difficult or almost impossible. If guests feel that the story cannot be true everywhere, all the time, they begin to doubt what they read, including the honest operators who are actually doing the hard work behind those words.

The Trust Gap Behind Sustainability Claims

The ease of putting sustainability language on menus, without proper validation, is now creating the opposite reaction of what we intend. When every place claims to use the same high-quality ingredients, truly authentic venues can appear more expensive, simply because they are paying a fair price for real craft and traceable supply chains. At the same time, mass-market businesses can market apparently “similar” quality on paper, at much lower cost. In the end, everyone loses, but those who suffer most are the artisanal producers. These often small and medium-sized enterprises see their products compared with large-scale suppliers and are forced to compete on price rather than on authenticity, craftsmanship, and their contribution to local communities.

Regulators have started to respond. The EU has long regulated organic labelling through Regulation (EU) 2018/848, which lays down strict rules for organic production and for using “organic” indications in labelling and advertising. In parallel, measures such as the Empowering Consumers for the Green Transition Directive and the proposed Green Claims Directive aim to tackle misleading environmental claims and greenwashing, requiring businesses to substantiate their sustainability statement before they reach consumers. Still, the speed of implementation and the capacity to verify these claims remain major challenges across a market with millions of small businesses and operators.

So how can we, as hospitality professionals, differentiate ourselves from competitors that rely on less transparent practices?

Technology offers powerful tools to track ingredient provenance and certify supply chains, and the use of blockchain and digital traceability is growing with promising use cases. But when we finally sit at the table for our weekly night out, most of us are not going to scan a QR code to factcheck the origin of the cabbage. I am certainly not. What I do check, often before making a reservation, is the restaurant’s social media presence.

Showing the Story Behind the Ingredients

Here lies a major opportunity to rebuild trust and give our farmers and artisans the visibility they deserve. Instead of only posting polished dishes, we can bring producers into the spotlight through short videos from the dairy farm that makes our cheese, photos from the fields where our carrots are harvested, features on the ceramist who made our china, or interviews with growers who explain why their products are different. By doing this consistently, we show real faces, real places, and real work behind every “local” and “sustainable” claim.

The same logic should extend beyond social media to every customer touchpoint. If we make the effort to serve genuinely special products and to support small businesses, our guests should be able to see exactly who we are partnering with. Rather than writing “local potatoes” on the menu, why not name the farm? Instead of “artisanal cheese”, mention the producer whose craft makes those flavours possible. Not long ago, I found myself questioning whether “local” should even appear as a stand-alone word on our menus. If it is truly special, then let us be precise. Credit the producer, tell the story, and help create new customers for them through our platforms.

In doing so, hospitality businesses can remain true enablers of local communities and small enterprises. We move from generic buzzwords to specific, verifiable relationships. Our team knows the stories, they have tasted them first-hand, and they are proud to be part of them. Hopefully, that is how we gradually restore confidence in the words our guests read on our menus while distinguishing the businesses that genuinely invest in their producers and communities.