Part 1
In these special episodes, we were joined by Natalie Lowe, who, in her 30-year professional career has worked in hospitality, hotels and events and continues to be a prominent figure within the event management sector. We spoke to her about the subject of sustainability within the foodservice industry. In the last 14 of these years, Natalie has owned, operated and played a crucial role as President and Secretary Treasurer at Celebrate Niagara, a destination management company based in the Niagara peninsula that specializes in corporate and association events. Most recently, she became the President of The Canadian Society of Professional Event Planners. Passionate about sustainability as well as local solutions to global problems, Natalie is the perfect guest to join us today about the importance of sustainability pertaining to the foodservice sector.
Light Transcript of Interview
K: Why don’t you tell us about yourself?
N: I’m a lifelong Canadian, I actually come from a tiny town in Northern Alberta called Slave Lake, 3 hours northwest of Edmonton. I lived and attended school in Edmonton for about half my life and the other half of my life I went as far south as I could get. I was in Toronto and now I’ve been in Niagara. This fall, it will be 23 years.
K: Wow.
N: I operate a couple of businesses here in Niagara but I actually wanted to be a dietitian but then I found out you had to work in a hospital and the people were ill and the food was restrictive and then I discovered that in hotels and restaurants; the food was quite good! So I transferred to Ryerson (University) and attended the hospitality and tourism program there and started working at Delta Hotels at its corporate office and came up through the ranks on sales here in Niagara. I opened my own business (Celebrate Niagara) about 14 years ago and then about a year and a half ago I opened up the sustainable planner because I was trying to learn how to make our events more sustainable. I wanted to learn how to make things more sustainable and couldn’t find anything that was easy and relatively inexpensive that I could just sit at my desk or my laptop at night and learn what I actually needed to know.
K: Right.
N: I ended up having to consume all of this information and I started to realize what we needed to do is really understand – and you’ve probably seen it yourself, us busy moms we’re working, we’re business people, we don’t have time to waste on actions that won’t actually move the needle. And so my question was, “what can I do that actually, really affects the cause?”. So I created the sustainable events for busy people course. Earlier this week we did the Sustainable Events Forum with my colleague Candice Tulsiram and we’ve gone from there. Now to talk about sort of, where I’ve come personally on my journey, I come from Alberta and everyone in my family is pretty much in the oil industry or the ranching industry, but we’ve made some real adjustments. For my 50th birthday earlier this year I gave up my car.
K: Oh wow.
N: We switched instead of having a meatless Monday, I buy meat from about one meal and some leftovers for the week. And I started looking at everything, how we interact with the world, and once you start to look at actually how we are consuming, it comes home to you and how wasteful we really are.
K: It’s funny you mention that, because there’s this whole thing of minimal living. It’s making sure that you’re not wasteful and you’re not having things that are excessive to your existence, like do we need x amount of food or x amount of clothes to survive? As long we have what we need to get by do we need to get any more than that? It’s funny you mentioned food waste because the conversation around sustainable farming for example, how does that contribute to what you do?
N: When I looked at becoming more sustainable I went to source documents, that meant I wanted original research and for that I used the IPCC (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change) Reports but then I looked at who was using that data effectively, and I found an organisation called DrawDown.org who took all the problems that the IPCC identified and they come up with the 100 most effective ways to combat them. And in the top 20, 8 of these are food related. So they’re either production, consumption, or post consumption waste and sometimes, are pre-consumption waste. The number one item that DrawDown.org identified was actually refrigerants. Number 3 on the list is actually food waste.
I took the three R’s and rejigged them for my course to do Refuse, Replace, Reduce, Reuse and Recycle. Why do I need to get ready in the morning, get into my car and go to a drive thru and have a cup of coffee?
K: I think what’s amazing as well is you’re an amazing example of not being afraid of change and I think there are so many other people, kind of, my generation, your generation, generations in between who are so happy and so comfortable with the way things are going that they refuse to change because it’s just too easy not to. You talk about going to a Starbucks or a Tim’s and picking up a coffee or something – if you look at the amount of waste that they generate from an environmental perspective – I mean I’m looking at a Tim’s coffee cup right now, I’m guilty of it myself. If we look at that on a day to day basis, how much food is left over, after a quiet day, for example, how can businesses overcome stuff like that? We’ve got ways for us, the consumers to get over wastefulness but from a business perspective when your sole job is to make sure you’re keeping up with the demand, how can a business prevent the waste?
N: Well what I’ll tell you is that not only am I businessperson but I’m also an entrepreneur. And so, when you’re an entrepreneur, you need to get very comfortab