Impresario Handmade Restaurants – which runs some of the country’s most innovative food experiences brands including SOCIAL, Smoke House Deli, Ishaara, and more – is getting serious about sustainability and environmental impact.
Organizations that heavily utilise plastic products and packaging are in dire need of interventions and solutions to address the waste they generate. Starting 2021 on a positive note, the L-Catterton-backed F&B company is partnering with AtWorks, an impact-focused entrepreneur support organisation that runs the Circular Impact Market Accelerator (CIMA). The goal of this first-of-its-kind partnership is to find entrepreneurs who can help the F&B industry adopt innovative new solutions to deal with plastic use and waste generated by their operations.
As part of this pan-India pilot covering over 20 Impresario restaurants across 3 cities (Bangalore, Mumbai, New Delhi), the six-month program will offer a platform to find solutions that help reduce the amount of plastic used by Impresario’s restaurants. By using alternatives and channelling plastic waste to recyclable and recoverable means, the two companies will seek to eliminate plastic waste from reaching landfills via a serious push towards plastic circularity.
Says Riyaaz Amlani, CEO & MD, Impresario Handmade Restaurants, “Sustainability is an important part of our DNA, and our philosophy of ‘minimal intervention, maximum upcycling’ has played a big role in our design process over the years. While we’ve been taking small steps here and there to run a more environmentally conscious enterprise, this partnership with AtWorks will really help us channel that vision into concrete action. Our internal teams are constantly thinking about how we can reduce our plastic usage and look to more sustainable alternatives, and this accelerator program will help us identify entrepreneurs and startups that can provide real-world solutions. At the end of the study, we hope to create a playbook of sustainable practices for the F&B industry in India, and drive adoption of the same over time.”
Shravan Shankar, Co-Founder & COO of AtWorks, says, “Most innovations offering alternatives to plastics or tackling plastic waste are upcoming or have not commercially scaled. We need to create opportunities between businesses who need sustainable innovations and startups building impact solutions and need to validate and grow their innovations. With Impresario’s help, we will be able to understand the real-world implications and scalability of such innovative ideas. Impresario is leading the charge for the F&B industry in India, and we’re excited to work with them to drive a wider shift.”
