Stunts in hospitality

With some of these initiatives, the low price turned out not to be the whole story, but a way to draw attention to a product launch. With others, the question runs deeper, and you hear it more often now: how much quality, animal welfare and fair sourcing can you still guarantee at a price that sits permanently below the average restaurant's cost price? One budget concept grew into a second location within a few months, while the question of whether that comes at the expense of what's on the plate stays unanswered. And for the restaurants that do invest in fair sourcing and fair prices, competing becomes almost impossible.

We say these things matter to us. Just, apparently, not when it comes to price. In the supermarket, the plant-based option is now often already cheaper than the animal-based one, and since 2020 more and more people give price as their reason for eating less meat. Climate and wallet no longer point in opposite directions. In hospitality, that link doesn't exist. There, cheap is just cheap.

That points to something structurally missing in hospitality: transparency. Turn a product over in a supermarket and you know where it comes from and what is in it. That information is standardised and verifiable. Order a dish billed as local or seasonal, and comparable information is usually absent. Not because most restaurants aren't doing anything, but because there is no shared structure for it. From September 2026 one thing changes: under the EmpCo directive, environmental claims will need to be backed by evidence, in hospitality too.

For the guest, it stays a guessing game what a price actually covers. That makes silence tempting: claim nothing and you have nothing to prove. But people no longer buy that. What's left is a false picture. It isn't really cheap food that exists, so much as the hype around it.

That's the crux of it. It isn't that people want a tenner meal now and then. I find that completely reasonable, and I don't begrudge anyone it. But every initiative that markets itself as cheap without showing what sits behind the price feeds the idea that food can fall in price indefinitely, as long as you are creative enough. That isn't a comparison, it's a contest between budget and value. We already know how that ends from other sectors: budget fashion, budget airlines. Anyone going along with it without asking what it costs already knows the bill turns up somewhere else.

The column's point, made concrete: a fair price and an honest kitchen are not opposites. Three from the list.

Speaking of walking the talk: our co-founder Thijs Koster has earned a place on this year's Food100, the list of 100 gamechangers working on a better food system, chosen by an independent jury. It recognises entrepreneurs driving the shift towards conscious dining and a more regenerative food system, the same mission behind My Treats, and exactly the kind of work Food100 exists to put forward.