Next of Kin
How can hospitality contribute to a more sustainable way of living? Matt Reid—restaurateur, producer and environmental entrepreneur—explains how his brand new food hall is more than just a place to eat
“What would we do if our traditional world no longer existed?” It’s a question that Matt Reid forced himself to ask, faced with the unprecedented changes brought on by Covid-19. The last few years have changed the world; and for the co-founder of Steelhead Group, which covers industries including hospitality, environmentalism, technology and media, 2022 is set to be a year where the answer has become crystal clear: “We had to build a new one.”
Reid isn’t only talking about the ways in which the dining industry has been forced to pivot and adapt, to create new worlds where deliveries and dark kitchens are the norm. For the last five years—in addition to his commitments to Maximal Concepts, the hospitality group he co-founded with business partner Malcolm Wood—he has been working as co-producer of
The Last Glaciers, a documentary by acclaimed filmmaker Craig Leeson, featuring young environmentalist Greta Thunberg. The film debuted in Imax cinemas worldwide this year on March 22—World Water Day—sending a powerful message about how the current climate crisis is accelerating the loss of Earth’s precious water reservoirs. It’s not the first environmental documentary Reid has worked on—both he and Wood were also part of the team who produced Leeson’s previous award-winning film, A Plastic Ocean, and their experiences have led to systemic changes within Maximal Concepts’ operations when it comes to sustainability.
Working on the films gave Reid a unique position to try to portray the urgency of the environmental issues we face in ways that are bite-sized, palatable and, therefore, effective. “When we were making
The Last Glaciers, we were trying to work out the conclusion of the film, and we watched all the other climate change documentaries,” he explains. “What we all unanimously agreed is the minute you got to the point where someone said, ‘Let’s do carbon sequestering’ [a method of reducing the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere to mitigate climate change], you just fell asleep. It’s really hard to follow the solution, and because it sounds so complicated, the internal feeling is: well, I definitely can’t do that.”
The one thing people can do though, is change the way they eat, and with a robust hospitality group
under his belt, Reid leant back into that experience to create the Kin platform, which is backed by Steelhead Group. The team has leveraged its expertise in pioneering technologies to build a more sustainable food system, one that focuses on micro-level changes as a priority, by focusing on two aspects: ingredients grown regeneratively, and reducing packaging over time. Diners can select dishes to order from the “recipe cloud” on Kin’s app—the team liken choosing food on it to selecting something to watch on Netflix, or a song on Spotify (they even refer to selections as a food playlist)—for dine-in, takeaway or delivery. Packaging for takeaways and delivery (which are limited to the immediate area around Taikoo Place and fulfilled on foot) are made from compostable bagasse, a waste by-product from the sugarcane and wheat straw industries, and a loyalty programme will ultimately plant trees in Bhutan on behalf of diners.
Launching this month, the first Kin food hall will serve more than 220 franchised dishes from more than 45 different restaurant and chef partners, from Yardbird to Years, a popular independent vegetarian café in Sham Shui Po. “The thing I’m most excited about are the talents that we’ve uncovered on the journey,” says Reid. “The dishes that have surprised us have been the dishes of the people we didn’t know.” He points to local chef Nero Ip and his fish maw on rice as a prime example; he’s also excited to bring in recipes from chefs around the region, not just Hong Kong, such as a beef kra pao dish from Easy Buddy in Bangkok, and Malaysian street food classics. Tastemakers such as Peggy Chan of Zerofoodprint Asia and Richard Ekkebus from Amber have also added their plant-based expertise to the menu. All recipes adhere to Kin’s strict ingredient charter, while a proprietary Enterprise Resource System allows for real-time calculation of food costs and adjustment of inventory according to sales data, to minimise waste.
“The genesis of Kin was trying to participate in a broken system, and coming to the conclusion that we couldn’t,” Reid says, pointing out how they took a hard look at how
much waste was being generated when Maximal Concepts partnered with delivery platforms during the pandemic. “There would be a major shift if we stopped trying to think about a city, which is what a delivery platform does, and started trying to think about a five-minute radius.” Instead of trying to be the most sustainable food brand for a population of more than 7 million, the aim of Kin is to go community by community—starting with the nine Swire buildings in Quarry Bay and Taikoo, which Reid sees as a microcosm for Hong Kong in this particular experiment. In the future, Reid sees the Kin model being applied to other high density urban environments around the world.
For now, the focus is on Hong Kong. In 2020 alone, food waste contributed the largest chunk—at 30 per cent—to the city’s landfills, mostly from domestic households and mostly plastic waste, an increase of 8 per cent from the previous year. In the last two years, that amount is likely to have increased due to a rise in takeouts and deliveries. Clearly, “cities need to change the way they eat,” Reid says, referring to seminal research done by the Ellen Mcarthur Foundation on the role of food in a circular economy. “Most of us will live in cities by 2050. If a city changed its consumption pattern, we would fundamentally change the global consumption patterns of food, and those fundamental shifts would have all the net effect of being a resolution to climate change.”
Kin’s goal is to produce a million meals in 2022, says Reid, estimating that about half of these meals will be delivered or packaged to go— and would have otherwise been executed by competing delivery platforms and restaurants that don’t adhere so closely to sustainability. “A majority of those orders probably would have been in a plastic bag or plastic packaging. [With Kin], that is now in a compostable packaging, so there is already a shift.” By 2025, the aim is to eliminate compostable packaging entirely and transition to a circular system of reusable containers, still delivered on foot. By their calculations, should Kin reach its benchmark, the amount of carbon emissions saved will be 69.6 tonnes—to put this into perspective, 3,480 trees must grow for at least one year in order to capture this amount.
At the end of the day, Reid is careful to point out that the aim of the sustainability strategy at Kin is not to preach to its diners. While he sees the collective impact of individual eating habits, ultimately it’s up to the city’s placemakers—that is, the developers, such as supporting partner Swire Properties—to drive meaningful change. “The consumer is not driving the environmental programme at Kin. We hope that it’s just accepted as part of the brand, like good design,” he explains. “I think we have to pull together and make these changes together, and then the government can come on top of that and make additional benefits, like banning single-use plastic or legislating against the use of ingredients that are unhealthy for our population. In many ways, my personal philosophy is that the greatest impact can come from systemic change.”
Though we often feel worlds apart, the truth is that today, more than ever, people are more connected than ever. Local is the new global, and the only way to make an impact on a global scale is to first engage on the home front. Under The Same Sky is a collection of stories that demonstrates this undeniable interconnectedness and the shared passions and actions that unite us. In partnership with Rolex, through its Perpetual Planet initiative, we bring together key advocates from the region and individuals from around the world who are crafting solutions to environmental challenges and committing to a sustainable future.
Sometimes the interests of an endangered or degraded environment can run contrary to the interests of the people who live among it. Rolex Awards for Enterprise laureate Laury Cullen Jr’s genius has been to get those two things working in harmony, allowing everyone to benefit.
Pontal do Paranapanema, a rural area of São Paulo state in Brazil, is
home to the magnificent Atlantic Forest, a semi-deciduous rainforest which hosts a spectacular profusion of wildlife, much of it unique to the region, including jaguars, ocelots, pumas, tapirs and maned wolves. Formerly completely covering the area, the forest was mostly cleared for farmland, with the remaining sections reduced to little more than fragments. That meant the animals that live in them, many of them belonging to endangered species, were unable to travel between sections, further threatening those populations.
Such was the situation when Cullen arrived in the area in the 1990s. He’d gone there to study an endangered species of monkey, the black lion tamarin, but soon became preoccupied by the main reason it was endangered in the first place: the environmental devastation.
His solution was the Dream Map, a plan to link the remaining areas together with passages of restored forest—some 60,000 hectares of it. So far it has resulted in 2,000 hectares being restored, with four million trees planted, locking up 800,000 tonnes of carbon a year.
However, he was also keenly aware that there are 6,000 families living in the area, and that the plan couldn’t be considered a success unless it was also in their interests—and probably wouldn’t work without their help anyway. That’s why, when he was given the Rolex Awards for Enterprise in 2004, he used his winnings to build the first of what has since become a network of 12 community tree nurseries. They further Cullen’s mission of helping local ecosystems to flourish, producing the seedlings of more than 100 native species. But equally importantly, they are mainly managed by local women—one of a number of ways in which Cullen’s programme tries to help local people make a better living working to conserve the forest than they could before, and removing the incentive to clear more forest for farmland. So far, the scheme has raised about US$2 million for the local economy.
“We could not save this last remaining forest if people were not a key component of the long-term conservation and communitybased conservation approach,” says Cullen. “Every single tree that we plant is produced by the local people in the communitybased nurseries. They are the ones who do the planting and all of the monitoring, so it is a great opportunity to provide jobs and food security for the rural poor.”