The Sustainable Restaurant Association (SRA) has announced a 2027 edition of its Food Made Good Standard, the framework that thousands of hotels, restaurants and other foodservice businesses use to certify their sustainability practices. The update adds clear criteria on plant-based and animal protein sourcing, and the Standard moves to full rollout, alongside a new digital assessment platform, starting in January 2027.
Businesses seeking certification must now confirm whether they have a written, time-bound policy to make at least 30% of their menus fully plant-based. The SRA’s Standard does not yet require the target to be met, but it asks operators to commit to a published timeline. The requirement follows similar moves by the Global Sustainable Tourism Council and Friend of the Earth, which added 30% plant-based menu criteria to their own certification standards earlier this year.
The SRA’s announcement also cites research showing plant-based foods require significantly fewer natural resources than animal proteins and generate substantially lower greenhouse gas emissions, while using far less land and water.
Welfare Benchmarks for Animal Protein
The updated Standard also asks businesses to confirm whether their sourcing meets specific welfare benchmarks:
- Seafood should come from producers that meet the parameters of the Model Seafood Welfare Standard, a model sourcing policy endorsed by a range of NGOs working on aquatic animal welfare.
- Poultry should meet the parameters of the Better Chicken Commitment.
- Eggs and pork should come from cage-free chickens, ducks and pigs, and crate-free systems.
Additional criteria cover humane electrical stunning of crustaceans and humane slaughter of wild-caught fish.
The inclusion of ducks is notable. Cage-free duck commitments are emerging as an industry trend among Chinese producers and restaurant chains, and a major foodservice certifier now asks for them alongside chickens and pigs.
What This Means for Certified Operators
The Standard is structured around three pillars, sourcing, society and environment, covering 10 framework areas and a communications section. Its welfare and plant-based criteria are now part of that framework, rather than optional add-ons, which means operators seeking certification will have to show their plans and sourcing choices against defined benchmarks.
“The choices foodservice businesses make every day reach far beyond their own operations,” said Juliane Caillouette Noble, CEO of the Sustainable Restaurant Association. “They inform global supply chains, influence how food is grown, caught and produced, affect the people who work throughout those systems and determine the impact on the natural world.”
