"Complying with seasonality consists in eating fruit and vegetables during the high production season and rejecting products grown in heated greenhouses or shipped in by air" summarizes Philippe Baguet, Quality and Food Safety Director at Elior. Simply put, it means eating French home-grown peaches in summer rather than peaches shipped in from South Africa in the deep of winter.
This makes it important to identify the consumption seasons for each fruit and vegetable: it's very short for strawberries (in the spring) but lasts all year round for apples, which keep without any difficulty.
A pedagogical approach
Philippe Baguet explains: "Elior takes seasonality into account for economic reasons and to comply with sustainable development values. It also addresses the wishes of its patrons who want to eat choucroute or stuffed cabbage in winter, but not in summer!"
Elior also regularly organizes teaching events focusing on a season's fruit or vegetable. "It is a way of reminding, or teaching patrons about the harvesting dates of the various products they eat", states Philippe Baguet.
A rule that is not always easy to obey
According to Philippe Baguet, it is not always easy to take this demand into consideration when drawing up a menu: « we can't apply this rule to all our supplies because it is not always possible to find out exactly how certain products were grown. A French tomato may well have been grown in a heated greenhouse in Brittany or in the open air in the South".
When it makes up its menus, Elior has to deal with another requirement too: meeting nutritional balance requirements. "It is almost impossible to comply fully with seasonal aspects when balancing a menu. What are the vegetables available in February in France? This means falling back on deep-frozen and preserved products", says Philippe Baguet.
Some Links
- Read our article "Privileging local procurement … as soon as you can!"
- See all the Groupe Elior commitments
- Find more information based on "Production and consumption" on the official Grenelle Round Table site