California restaurants add climate change tax
Money goes to farmers to help them reduce carbon dioxide
SAN FRANCISCO — Eating out is already getting more expensive, as restaurants nationwide raise prices to cover rising rents and employee costs.
Now, some California diners will get hit with a climate change tax.
Spurred by a Bay Area restaurateur, eateries across the state will have the option this fall of joining the Restore California Renewable Restaurant program, which adds 1% to the bill.
The program is optional for restaurants and consumers alike. Funds from the initiative go to help farmers make changes in their fields that would help capture carbon dioxide. CO2 is considered among the chief contributors to climate change.
“Across the country, restaurants are an $800 billion business and represent 1 in 10 U.S. workers, which is too much money and people to not be part of the solution,” says Anthony Myint, co-founder of Mission Chinese, a local restaurant that has been adding an optional 3% surcharge to its bills since last summer.
The new initiative comes against a backdrop of rising dining prices. In January, full-service restaurant prices were up 2.7 percent from a year earlier, well above the 1.6 percent annual rise for inflation overall, according to the consumer price index.
But Myint is convinced adding a few cents to a bill for a good cause won’t make customers balk.
So far, 25 restaurants globally have signed on to the initiative’s so-called Zero Foodprint pledge. On a $50 check, a 3% surcharge would be $1.50, and a 1% charge is 50 cents.
“Since we started adding 3% last summer, zero people have opted out,” he says.
The genesis of the new tax is Myint’s deep passion for combining entrepreneurship with social activism. A few years ago, he started the Perennial Farming Initiative, a non-profit aimed at helping restaurant owners go carbon neutral — which means finding ways to offset the carbon dioxide produced by a business by investing in enterprises that take CO2 out of the atmosphere.
So far, 25 restaurants globally have signed on to the initiative’s so-called Zero Foodprint pledge. On a $50 check, a 3% surcharge would be $1.50, and a 1% charge is 50 cents.
California has long been on the forefront of ecological issues, from land conservation to early solar power adoption. State leaders, including Gov. Gavin Newsom, have vowed to make the state carbon neutral by 2045.
For restaurant owners, the easiest way to help with carbon sequestration is to help farmers adopt measures, often initially costly, to make their fields retain rather than emit carbon. These include adding compost to improve soil health, planting cover crops in between cash crops, and planting hedgerows with woody plants that store carbon in their roots.
“Ingredients represent 65% of where an average restaurant’s carbon footprint lies,” Myint says. “So you have to look carefully at how the ingredients you use are produced.”
Myint’s local effort went statewide after he connected with officials from the California Air Resources Board and the California Department of Food and Agriculture during a Global Action Climate Summit here last September.
“Anthony wanted to provide even more confidence to his customers around where this surcharge was going, so he approached CARB and us about a collaboration,” says Karen Ross, secretary of the state’s Department of Food and Agriculture.
“The state uses its expertise around carbon sequestration farming practices we’ve vetted, to do that accounting and add transparency.
“This could maybe serve as a model for other businesses and investors to use their buying power to do similar things.”
To receive a government cap and trade grant, farmers can apply directly for funds in exchange for committing to actions that include upgrading old farming equipment and installing renewable energy power options.
In contrast, the new 1% climate change tax would give restaurant owners the ability to distribute the funds directly to growers that they work with for their produce.
Myiant, who also has Mission Chinese locations in New York, says that if 1% of California’s nearly 100,000 restaurants were to successfully adopt the new climate change surcharge, $10 million a year would be raised.
Those funds would supplement a variety of existing California programs that farmers can avail themselves of when trying to improve the health of their soil, says Renata Brillinger, executive director of CalCAN, the California Climate & Agriculture Network, a coalition of sustainable agriculture organizations.
“Over the last 50 years, farms moved toward the chemical management of their fields, which resulted in a series of air, water and climate problems,” Brillinger says.
“But now, we here in California, and in other parts of the country, are seeing consumer taking more interest in where their food comes from and how it’s grown. Restaurants are driven often by consumer trends, so this new optional tax should appeal.”
Just how the state’s restaurants will react remains to be seen.
“It’s too early days,” says Sharokina Shams, vice president of public affairs for the California Restaurant Association.
“These days, bill surcharges are nothing new, whether its to help with employee pay and benefits or for a cause like the wildfires. So this seems like a group of well-intentioned people finding another way to use a surcharge.
“California restaurants ring up 10 million transactions a day, so working through them can be an effective way to raise consumer awareness.”