Enhancing compliance assessment through regenerative transformations – A food waste perspective

Addressing food waste is a growing priority for hotel groups. However, aligning corporate sustainability goals with the practicalities of individual hotels is challenging. While hotels increasingly adopt certification programs to enable transparency on sustainability performance, there is a risk that compliance-based assessment systems may not fully capture the nuances of each hotel's local context. The notion of regeneration, emphasizing reinvestment in people, place and the natural world, offers the potential to bridge the gap between corporate waste targets, hotel operations and local outcomes. Food waste, recoverable through a biological cycle, aligns with the principles of regeneration. This study explores the perspectives of practitioners involved in certification and benchmarking and those advocating for regeneration in the tourism sector. This study explores whether compliance assessment systems are sufficient to account for the challenges associated with hotel food waste and whether regenerative enhancements could be conceptualised. Through in-depth interviews, the research reveals a divide between compliance assessment and regeneration across key areas. A conceptual framework is introduced, highlighting areas of convergence that could enhance existing certification programs – with the ultimate aim of helping hotels reconsider their relationship with food waste and their local ecological system.