In 2020, the prestigious Michelin Restaurant Guide launched its Green Star (GS) award for commitment to sustainability. This qualitative study uses interviews, field observations, and secondary data to explore why the GS has emerged and why it is relevant.
Findings indicate the GS award has emerged as a result of demand from customers and other field members within the restaurant industry, and an overall social demand for sustainability. Additionally, the GS is relevant because it contributes to the emergence of sustainable gastronomy as a high-status market category, a process explained using theorization by allusion framework (Delmestri & Greenwood, 2016). The framework applies almost fully to this study, with the major exception being the theoretical contribution on the crucial role of a strategic entrepreneur, which is disproved under this context.
An additional mechanism called category shared knowledge is proposed as a substitute for such role within a context of multiple elite players in a field contributing to the recategorization of sustainable gastronomy. This market recategorization is relevant because the status increase of sustainable gastronomy has subsequent positive sustainability outcomes at the organizational level, the local community, sector-wide, and could potentially scale beyond those levels and into other industries. Practical implications include knowledge related to the process of obtaining the GS award which can be used by traditional Red Star (and other) restaurants to transition to sustainability, and how Michelin can address its main challenge of industry polarization in its GS initiative.
07 February 2024