Assessing environmental gains from sustainability interventions in a competitive market setting: A foodservice case study

Managers can improve the sustainability of foodservice outlets in many ways, including changes to the types of food served, service ware chosen, and how waste is discouraged and managed. However, given competitive markets, managers must consider how such changes affect consumer patronage and its knock-on effects to firm profits and market-wide environmental impacts. We develop a decisional life cycle assessment (LCA) framework for assessing foodservice interventions that permits calibration of market-wide environmental impacts from the point of view of a single establishment altering its practices and experiencing changes in patronage and costs due to market competition. We simulate market share responses to several restaurant sustainability interventions based upon results from a foodservice field experiment while revenues, operational costs, and environmental impacts are estimated using industry and literature sources. While some interventions, such as serving meals with more vegetables and less meat, reveal large cradle-to-grave environmental impacts via the attributional LCA, the decisional LCA reveals smaller market-wide impacts as some consumers choose competitors who continue to serve meals with the full portion of meat. Within the decisional LCA results, interventions that alter meal elements (less meat, more vegetables) yield larger reductions in environmental impacts than other interventions (compostable plates, composting food scraps, food waste reduction). Decisional LCA articulates the trade-offs between private profitability and environmental impacts to help managers decide how to best improve sustainability in the face of market competition.