Canteens account for 15% of the EU’s greenhouse gas emissions: training and concrete support are needed.
It is estimated that in Italy alone, approximately 11 million people use school, university, workplace, and hospital canteens—both public and private—every day, resulting in a total annual volume of around 1.5 billion meals served. This alone illustrates how institutional catering serves as an essential, albeit often overlooked, pillar of the European agri-food and welfare systems. Today, however, the sector faces unprecedented structural and environmental challenges, as it has been found to account for 15% of the European Union’s total greenhouse gas emissions. Compounding this urgency is a chronic shortage of qualified personnel at all levels, from operations to management.
Consequently, large-scale catering services must mitigate their impact by optimizing consumption and reducing waste. The four-year RestaCoVe project, led scientifically by the Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore, moves precisely in this direction: its goal is to innovate training opportunities to ensure healthier menus and the adoption of eco-friendly, circular operational models.
We discuss this with Professor Michele Fontefrancesco, Associate Professor of Cultural Anthropology at the Università Cattolica (campuses in Piacenza, Brescia, and Milan) and the project’s Principal Investigator.
Professor, how can the restaurant industry influence the green transition?
When we think of pollution, we tend to immediately associate it with heavy industry or transportation, rarely with the restaurant industry.
Yet the food sector—and institutional catering in particular—has a significant environmental impact, affecting multiple areas simultaneously. The first and most significant aspect concerns greenhouse gas emissions: on a global scale, food systems as a whole are responsible for nearly a third of worldwide emissions. These figures demand serious reflection. In this regard, a study conducted in Turin revealed a telling statistic: the production of ingredients used to prepare a meal accounts for 78% of the total emissions generated by that meal. This means that adjusting menu composition—for instance, by reducing meat and fish in favor of plant-based proteins and eggs—can lead to an emissions reduction of up to 32%. A second critical issue is food waste. In the European Union, approximately 20% of produced food is wasted annually; however, in school canteens, this figure can reach as high as 70% of prepared meals. This is a staggering statistic, highlighting that the problem lies not only in production but also—and perhaps primarily—in consumption. Added to this are the daily operational demands of catering facilities—energy, water, packaging, and single-use materials—which collectively contribute to a substantial ecological footprint.
When was the RestaCoVE project launched?
The RestaCoVE project—officially titled “VET Excellence Pathways for Sustainable Collective Catering and Restaurants”—was born from the recognition of a training gap: the foodservice sector lacks structured, up-to-date skills regarding sustainability. It is a four-year project launched under the 2025 Erasmus+ call for Centres of Vocational Excellence (CoVEs).
In terms of its structure, RestaCoVE aims to establish Centres of Vocational Excellence involving a total of 18 partners across six European countries: Italy, Greece, Malta, Romania, Slovakia, and Turkey. Its strength lies in the diverse nature of the network it mobilizes: vocational education and training (VET) institutes, universities, regional authorities, and private enterprises collaborate within a unified learning and innovation ecosystem. Thus, it is not a top-down initiative, but rather a cooperation platform designed to connect worlds that have traditionally remained separate—education, academia, local communities, and the market—around a shared goal.
What is it aiming for?
RestaCoVE structures its mission around three closely interconnected general objectives. The first concerns educational excellence: the project aims to build a European-level teaching and learning model for sustainable collective catering, based on flexible training pathways and micro-credentials recognized across EQF levels 3 to 7. This entails training professionals with certified, marketable skills at various qualification levels. The second objective focuses on structured cooperation: RestaCoVE seeks to foster stable, long-lasting collaboration among the education sector, businesses, universities, and local communities, moving beyond isolated projects to create a relational ecosystem that endures beyond the project itself. The third objective addresses governance and institutional sustainability: the aim is to strengthen the strategic planning of educational ecosystems and integrate collective catering into regional Smart Specialization Strategies (S3), thereby ensuring continuity and local integration for the initiatives launched. It is also worth highlighting a particularly innovative feature: the project employs tools derived from neuroscience and consumer psychology to understand and steer people’s food choices toward healthier, more sustainable options—an approach that goes far beyond mere technical training.
The project has mobilized a transnational network; can it therefore be exported abroad?
Indeed, transnationality is not merely an incidental feature of RestaCoVE but a fundamental element of its project design. From its inception, the project was conceived to produce tools and models capable of circulating freely across diverse national systems.
The primary tool in this regard is the adoption of European Digital Credentials for Learning (EDC); this system ensures that skills acquired within the project are recognizable and transferable between countries, thereby overcoming barriers created by differences in national education and training systems. This is complemented by the adoption of international standards—such as ISO 22005 for food traceability—which makes the developed protocols applicable throughout the European context.
Yet, there is an even more compelling aspect: RestaCoVE aims to internationalize best practices that already exist at the national level. A prime example is the Italian “Minimum Environmental Criteria” (CAM), which serve as a model of excellence for sustainable public procurement regulation. Through the project’s transnational network, such initiatives can be shared, adapted, and adopted in partner countries, sparking a process of positive cross-pollination between different systems and cultures.
Do you believe the restaurant industry is ready to make the necessary changes to reduce its impact on the green transition?
The honest answer is that the sector is not yet fully prepared, despite facing mounting external pressure pushing it in that direction.
A key issue arises from an apparent paradox: while 93% of European citizens say they want healthy meals in public canteens, only 12% actually base their food choices on environmental sustainability criteria. There is, therefore, a wide gap between stated aspirations and actual behavior; this suggests that while a demand for change exists, it is not yet mature or informed enough to translate into consistent daily choices.
Regarding training, current programs often prove inadequate: many offer only superficial theoretical concepts of sustainability without developing practical skills such as sustainable food marketing or advanced waste management. RestaCoVE aims to bridge precisely this gap.
Finally, there is the challenge facing small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs), which form the backbone of the foodservice sector. For many of them, new European regulations—such as the Green Claims Directive—are perceived not as an opportunity but as an additional bureaucratic burden, especially given the lack of specific training to help interpret and implement them. The message is clear: without training guidance and concrete support, SMEs risk being left behind, turning the green transition into a privilege reserved for large operators. And this is precisely where projects like RestaCoVE can make a difference.
