Good afternoon. Let me first begin by introducing our team that is composed of myself Hanae, my lovely teammates Natasha and Sumayya. Today our Presentation will be entitled Green Tomatoes.

Looking at these pictures, you might have already guessed the topic I will be discussing. And yes, it is in fact, dining out. This practice has become such an integral part of our modern lifestyle. Whether it is for that very short lunch break or a casual hang out with friends or maybe celebrating a loved one’s birthday without having to worry about the dishes piling up. It is something we do a lot, very frequently, and as you will come to see, it does matter.

Let’s have a look at this big number on the screen. This shows how much we love eating out since there are over 140,000 restaurants across Tokyo alone.

To give you more perspective, let me talk a little bit about one of Japan’s most favorite foods: Sushi. In Tokyo alone, there are over 5,000 sushi restaurants. But, do you know that on average a sushi restaurant produces 355 MTCO2e/year. When emissions from all these sushi restaurants are combined, they will generate approximately 1.8 million MTCO2e/year which is comparable to round trip flights from Tokyo to New York times 600,000.

All these greenhouse gas emissions will be released to the atmosphere and worsen our climate condition.

So, let’s start asking ourselves. How can we still enjoy eating in restaurants with our friends and family and yet create a lower carbon footprint?

First, here are some facts. 95% of us want to know what we are getting beforehand and it is very common when we browse through the internet to find out about something that we are interested in. On top of that 90% of us trust reviews of other customers in order to make right choices.

Additionally, another survey shows us that among the younger generation, 70% choose ethical products and 65% take the product’s origin into consideration. These numbers teach us that reviews take a significant role among consumers and environmental issues are more relevant than ever for them.

Inspired by the previously mentioned information, our solution comes in the form of green tomatoes.

It is a review aggregation platform that will allow individuals to access eco-oriented ratings and information related to dining establishments around them. It will also provide them with the unique opportunity to contribute in rating and reviewing such businesses according to their real-life experience.

The premise is extremely simple. All you would have to do is open a web browser, look up green tomatoes and start navigating, by location, keyword, or category.

Consequently, you will be served with a list of matching restaurants for instance along with their environmental rating, any relevant label or certificate they might pose as well as customers reviews.

On green tomatoes, two kinds of ratings will be provided. The first one being, a consumer-generated-review resulting from the diners’ own experience and observations, while the second one will be an expert-generated-ratings, that will come from specialists in the environmental and scientific communities, such as environmental NGOs and NPOs, Academic institutions and research institutes.

Now, I am going to show you how exactly consumers are going to rate about a restaurant on Green Tomatoes.

There are basically five indicators all of which cover things that we can see and experience when going out to a restaurant. Consumers will rate on a scale from one to five with five being the most compliant with climate action.

First, consumers will rate whether the restaurants are still using disposables or reusables for their utensils.

They will also rate whether the restaurants provide eco-friendly alternatives for packaging such as paper bags.

Then they will rate whether the restaurants are being mindful with their paper uses. For instance, some restaurants have started using gadgets or devices to make orders.

And then they will rate whether the restaurants are still using physical flyers to promote their business or if they have started using paper-less promotional media such as social media.

Lastly, they will rate the efforts that the restaurants have made to save electricity, for example, by minimizing the use of artificial lights when they have access to natural lights.

Other than consumers, experts will be providing more thorough and reliable reviews that cover a wider part of the restaurants’ business.

Experts’ review will cover three indicators; electricity source, food waste, and ingredients.

Those three indicators are inspired by this data. As you can see here, ingredients caused the highest share of emissions created by restaurants, followed by energy, waste, and transportation.

First, to review their electricity sources, experts will see the provider that the restaurant is connected to and the proportion of renewables incorporated into the mix. We will also see the restaurant’s effort on providing their own source, for instance if they use solar power or other alternative sources.

In the food waste indicator, experts will review how much food waste produced in the restaurants compared to the total mass of food they serve.

Last but not least, ingredients as the most important indicator. Experts will see the type of ingredients used in the restaurant, are they using more vegetables or meat as the first creates less carbon footprint than the latter. Additionally, experts will also consider the source of the ingredients. Locally produced and organic ingredients are more sustainable as they create lower emissions from shorter transportation distance and absence of chemical use.

Hopefully by now we have managed to capture your attention enough to think positively of our idea. Yet, you might be still wondering: how exactly will Green Tomatoes contribute to reducing CO2 emissions?

Our answer is rather simple. Green Tomatoes’ main aspiration is empowering individuals like us through information. By providing an environmental rating of restaurants, not only will they be able to make a more educated choice when dining out, thus reducing their carbon footprint, but they might even be able to help others do the same. Not only that, we believe that green tomatoes can help to propel change within an entire industry by either supporting restaurants that demonstrate commitment towards sustainability, or through incentivizing those which have yet to have commitments to do the same, and eventually bring down CO2 emissions across the board.

Now let’s talk about how we can invite people to start participating in our movement. We have at least three strategies.

The first and the easiest one is that we can give out stickers to our affiliated restaurants. And we can also ask environmental NGOs/NPOs to help promote our platform.

Last but not least, we can collaborate with existing restaurant review platforms such as Tabelog which is pretty big in Japan. We can simply integrate our sustainability rating to their already established and widely known restaurant ratings.

With green tomatoes, all of us can take action to tackle climate change and help other consumers and restaurants to do the same. With efforts from both sides we can make our eating out culture healthier, not only for ourselves but also for the future of our beloved planet. Thank you!