WWF-Philippines and the Department of Tourism Conduct a Sustainability Training for Panglao Tourism and Food Service Stakeholders
September 2019
Melody Melo-Rijk, WWF’s Project Manager for Sustainable Consumption and Production in the Philippines, presenting statistics on hunger and food waste to restaurant and hotel representatives from Panglao.
The World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF) Philippines, through its pioneer project on sustainable consumption and production, The Sustainable Diner: A Key Ingredient for Sustainable Tourism, conducted a sustainability training for tourism and food service stakeholders in the Municipality of Panglao, the top tourist destination in the whole of Bohol Province, from September 18 to 19, 2019 at the Be Grand Resort. In partnership with the Department of Tourism (DOT), the series of sustainability trainings are slated to run across different regions in the country, with the goal of promoting sustainable tourism from the lens of sustainable food production and consumption practices.
Donald Balanhi, DOT Central Office’s Senior Tourism Operations Officer, explaining the importance of the partnership between the DOT and The Sustainable Diner project in implementing the department’s mandate of promoting sustainable tourism.
Riza Marie Macaibay, DOT Region VII’s Senior Tourism Operations Officer, formally welcomed the participants from across the Municipality of Panglao to the two-day training. She started by detailing the current tourism status of the region, harping on its beauty and its popularity with both domestic and international visitors. The Central Visayas Region is comprised of four provinces - Cebu, Bohol, Negros Oriental, and Siquijor - and three highly-urbanized cities - Cebu City, Lapu-Lapu, and Mandaue. She then focused on the activities and initiatives being planned and implemented in the municipality itself. She was followed by Donald Balanhi, DOT Central Office’s Senior Tourism Operations Officer, who explained the correlation between The Sustainable Diner project of WWF-Philippines and why a partnership has been made between the two organizations. The promotion of sustainable dining in the food service industry is in line with the department’s mandate to develop a tourism industry that is ecologically sustainable, responsible, participative, culturally sensitive, economically viable, and ethically and socially equitable for local communities. The department also wants to encourage the private sector to participate in achieving responsible tourism. He highlighted that tourism, especially culinary and farm tourism, has a big role to play in addressing issues of food security and sustainability, in general.
Kate Dychangco-Anzani, President of Anzani International Group, shares the best practices that they are implementing in their restaurants, all in the name of sustainability and contributing to the larger picture.
Afterwards, Kate Dychangco-Anzani, President of Anzani International Group, shared with the participants the sustainability practices that her restaurants have been espousing. She started by listing the reasons why Anzani has chosen to go sustainable, stating that it is very important in any endeavor to follow your “why.” For Anzani, sustainability means future-proofing our businesses and finding better ways to solve the different problems we are encountering in our operations. While our restaurants operate in different ways and according to their own identities, we make sure that our management and all of our staff are aligned with the bigger picture we are envisioning,” says Dychangco-Anzani. “Our why is simply not only Anzani’s. It is something we share with our diners. The future of the planet affects the future of all of our diners, and what they choose to eat will ultimately affect how they live their lives and how they can have a positive impact on the greater scheme of things.” Speaking more about the changes they’ve made in their operations, Dychangco-Anzani mentioned the importance of provenance and knowing where their ingredients come from. “When we started, 85% of our ingredients were imported. We needed to find alternatives and so we went back to the concept of provenance. Now, as part of The Sustainable Diner program, we are proud to say that sourcing locally and forging relationships with local suppliers became one of our major goals in our journey towards sustainability. In fact, we are aiming to be 100% sustainable by 2022,” shares Dychangco-Anzani. “We were able to slowly green our supply chain and operations by working with local farmers, offering healthy dishes in our menu, creating schemes for potential food waste reduction, and reducing the use of single-use plastics.”
Melody Melo-Rijk, Project Manager for Sustainable Consumption and Production in the Philippines, conducted the training sessions on food safety and safe food handling, and on food waste management. The first one update the participants on current food safety and food handling practices, which were all essential in reducing food wastes in their restaurants and hotels. The training was based on ServSafe, a food and beverage safety training and certification program that covers the latest FDA Code and extensive food sanitation training research and experience into its manual, providing participants comprehensive training guidelines. For the second training, which used a localized version of the Food Waste Management Toolkit, the overall goal is for companies and organizations to set-up a food waste management system focusing on two major phases: pre-service and post-service. These will be then used as baseline data to set food waste reduction goals. The toolkit was developed by WWF US in collaboration with the American Hotel and Lodging Association (AHLA) and with the generous support from the Rockefeller Foundation.
Liezl Stuart Del Rosario, The Sustainable Diner project’s Policy Specialist, presenting the project’s background, objectives, and activities, and its relation to the greater goal of the organization.
Meanwhile, Liezl Stuart Del Rosario, The Sustainable Diner project’s Policy Specialist, informed the participants of The Sustainable Diner project’s background, objectives, and activities. She also facilitated the visioning and action-planning workshops. The visioning exercise helped the participants identify their common goals for the hotels and restaurants and even for the local governments, with extra attention to sustainability principles of local sourcing, food waste reduction, consumption of plant-based dishes, efficient resource use, and refusal of single-use plastics. The action-planning workshop, on the other hand, helped the participants focus their ideas and come up with particular steps to take in order to achieve their set goals. Some of the issues they brought to the fore were lack of food waste management in their properties, absence of food donation mechanisms, lack of consistent supply of locally-produced goods, limited number of accredited haulers of used cooking oil, high cost of single-use plastic alternatives, and low knowledge on resource conservation among employees. After a meaningful discussion, the participants were able to name possible solutions to these issues.
Divided into groups, participants discussed the different issues they were facing in their own establishments, while searching for and co-creating solutions to solve these problems.
The participants then formed an association that commits to meet regularly to share sustainability practices and know-how. They are expected to expand as the elected officers reach out to more hotel and restaurants in Panglao. They agreed to have their first meeting on October 9, 2019, to plan activities for the last quarter of the year.
The Sustainable Diner project would like to thank the DOT-Philippines for their continued support and trust, as well as the DOT Region VII for allowing the project to capacitate and empower their local tourism stakeholders. While the project mainly focuses on three key sites, - Quezon City, Cebu City, and Tagaytay City - being able to spread our message and deliver our trainings in other tourism hotspots across the country would help in ensuring that we are able to share our advocacy on sustainable dining with more individuals and businesses.
The Sustainable Diner project, under WWF-Philippines’ Sustainable Consumption and Production, is part of the International Climate Initiative (IKI). The Federal Ministry for the Environment, Nature Conservation, and Nuclear Safety (BMU) supports this initiative on the basis of a decision adopted by the German Bundestag.
For more information, please contact:
Melody Melo-Rijk
Project Manager
mmelorijk@wwf.org.ph
For media arrangements, please contact:
Pamela Luber
Integrated Marketing Communications Specialist
pluber@wwf.org.ph
Lorayne Roque
Sustainable Consumer Specialist
lroque@wwf.org.ph
