The Sustainable Diner project of the World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF) Philippines was invited to speak at the Responsible Innovation and Consumer Trends in the Food Value Chain breakout session. The breakout session was developed to acknowledge that the way that we grow, transform, and consume food is closely linked to many of today’s sustainability challenges. There is a growing number of issues that are closely linked to food security and agriculture--from climate change to biodiversity loss to human health impacts. Melody Melo-Rijk, WWF’s Project Manager for Sustainable Consumption and Production in the Philippines, was invited to talk about consumer expectations on sustainability and how the market is responding to these expectations, based on a baseline consumer study in the Philippines conducted by The Nielsen Company for The Sustainable Diner project.

“For Filipino diners, we did a baseline survey on how they see or perceive sustainability. Does it resonate with them? What are their consumption patterns and basically, how do they practice sustainability? We did this kind of market research because we want to know the proper channels for us to reach out to them, what type of messaging we can make, what type of campaign we can focus on,” says Melo-Rijk. “Sustainability is an up-and-coming term for the market. Sustainability as a concept is not yet that strong in the Philippines but the key terms that are very much familiar with Filipinos include environment-friendly, food waste, and climate change. The issue on food waste has always been something that resonated with the Filipino market because of values instilled in us as children, that wasting food is bad and that wasting food means wasting money.”

Filipinos have always valued taste, ambiance, service, and price whenever they do dine out. More recently, the terms “Instagrammable” or “Instagram-worthy” have also been associated with the success of restaurants and other dining establishments in the country. Given these primary considerations, is sustainability then a top priority for Filipinos who dine out? “We cannot take away the possibility that sustainability can be a consideration, because in the first place, sustainability, especially in dining, has not been properly established yet in the Philippines,” states Melo-Rijk. “We cannot also really say that Filipinos are not into sustainability because when we ask them separately about the different practices that are considered sustainable or are related to sustainable dining, they are actually doing most of them. It’s just that they are not aware that these practices are considered sustainable.”