◊ By Pure & Eco India

Impresario Handmade Restaurants – which runs food experiences brands like SOCIAL, Smoke House Deli, Ishaara, etc – is getting serious about sustainability and environmental impact.

Beginning 2021 on a positive note, the L-Catterton-backed F&B company is partnering with AtWorks, an impact-focused entrepreneur support organisation that runs the Circular Impact Market Accelerator (CIMA).

The goal of this partnership is to find entrepreneurs who can help the F&B industry adopt innovative new solutions to deal with plastic use and waste generated by their operations.

As part of this pan-India pilot covering over 20 Impresario restaurants across 3 cities (Bengaluru, Mumbai, New Delhi), the 6-month programme will offer a platform to find solutions that help reduce the amount of plastic used by Impresario’s restaurants.

By using alternatives and channelling plastic waste to recyclable and recoverable means, the two companies will seek to eliminate plastic waste from reaching landfills via a serious push towards plastic circularity.

Riyaaz Amlani, CEO & MD, Impresario Handmade Restaurants, says, “Sustainability is an important part of our DNA, and our philosophy of ‘minimal intervention, maximum upcycling’ has played a big role in our design process over the years. While we’ve been taking small steps to run a more environmentally conscious enterprise, this partnership with AtWorks will help us channel that vision into concrete action. At the end of the study, we hope to create a playbook of sustainable practices for the F&B industry in India, and drive adoption of the same over time.”

Shravan Shankar, Co-Founder & COO of AtWorks, says, “Most innovations offering alternatives to plastics or tackling plastic waste are upcoming or have not scaled commercially. We need to create opportunities between businesses that need sustainable innovations and startups building impact solutions. With Impresario’s help, we will be able to understand the real-world implications and scalability of such innovative ideas.”

The Circular Impact Market Accelerator is India’s first product accelerator to increase the adoption of alternatives and solutions to plastic use and waste in mainstream industry.

Operated by AtWorks, with support from The Incubation Network (TIN), the programme aims to help bridge the gap between solutions to plastic use and their acceptance in mainstream markets.