Efforts in Cork to drive sustainable tourism ahead of World Gastronomic Capital bid 

At the beginning of the new year, the much-revered Time Out magazine named Cork the third-best city break destination in Europe for 2025.

The listing, which focused on “second cities, the obscure cultural capitals, and those surprising little places that make for the ideal affordable city break”, singled Cork out for its reputation as “the cooler, more chilled younger sibling to jam-packed Dublin” that for decades has drawn visitors in for its “creative scene of art and live music”.

The article cited the newly- launched Cork Fringe festival (taking place from May 9-11) as a key reason to visit the rebel city this year.

Of course, we Corkonians have always known the city and county are dripping with creative talent of all kinds, but it has been for our food culture and epic scenery that most people chose to spend time in the company of rebels!

Tourism was the reason more than 200 people from across the tourism, hospitality, food and drink sectors gathered at Cork International Hotel in recent weeks for an event with a particular focus on sustainable tourism and how Cork is leading the way.

Speakers on the day included Michael Magner, president of the Irish Hotels Federation and proprietor of Vienna Woods Hotel; Ger O’Mahony, chair of Visit Cork, Seamus Heany, Evelyn Fitzpatrick and Katherine Fitzpatrick, of Pure Cork; and Brian Flynn, Head of Ireland’s Ancient East at Fáilte Ireland.

Together, they outlined a vision for Cork’s leisure and business tourism in the coming year.

Despite the widely reported challenges facing the sector, the overall picture is a positive one, and opportunities are plentiful to capitalise on Cork’s existing reputation as a cultural centre for food and the arts.

Focusing on business tourism, conference revenue in Cork has doubled from €6m in 2022 to €12.4m in 2024, with the average number of international visitor trips to Ireland up 7% year-on-year.

Some of the 13% increase in expenditure is linked to the higher cost base but doesn’t for it all.

It was also revealed that hotels and guesthouses contribute €900m annually to the Cork economy, without including knock-on tourism spending at restaurants, pubs, attractions, experiences, retail, etc.

A key finding in Fáilte Ireland’s research into what visitors want to see when they travel shows a greater interest in destinations actively engaged in and promoting sustainable tourism – sometimes it is the reason to visit a particular destination.

Cork continues to perform well in this regard.

The Global Destination Sustainability Index (GDSI) ranks destinations around the world on their performance against benchmarking metrics for sustainability.

In 2018, Cork had a rating of 42.3%, jumping to 77.2% in 2024, placing the region 21st out of 100 destinations indexed, well within the coveted Top 40 ranking.

However, Pure Cork’s sustainability expert, Katherine Fitzpatrick, says there are ways Cork can collectively improve as a top sustainable destination for both business and leisure tourism.

One such area ripe for improvement is regarding food waste.

An expert discussed the many ways food waste can be reduced, removed, or otherwise harnessed as a tool for good within business tourism, particularly for conferencing and events.

Rosie Fuller, of the food redistribution network FoodCloud, said that in 2024, 1.25m meals per week were re-distributed by Food Cloud alone. Other initiatives have come on stream to ensure as much excess food as possible is repurposed in different ways, such as FoodCloud Kitchen, Food Truck and Academy.

FoodCloud Kitchen deals with large amounts of a single food item that redistribution alone cannot handle. Fuller cited examples such as 77 pallets of yogurt arriving in a single day, or fish fillets supplied by BIM at the end of a fish filleting course. Its team of two professional chefs plus volunteers turn would-be food waste into other ‘added value’ food products in something of a Ready, Steady, Cook scenario, and it is provided to community schemes such as Meals on Wheels.

The food truck caters for events creating menus from food in the distribution hubs, and a newly- launched FoodCloud Academy offers courses to upskill chefs, cooks and other hospitality professionals in food waste prevention, for free.

Virginia O’Gara, of vegan food company My Goodness and the Cork Urban Soil Project (CUSP), talked about identifying food waste as the problem that led to the solution of producing soil for growing food in an industrial urban environment.

Even though My Goodness intentionally try to avoid producing food waste, they still generated 20 tonnes in one year. To these kitchen scraps were added waste beer mats and spent botanicals from a brewery and distillery operating within the same industrial park.

Fed into their biodigester, the waste was repurposed into 10 tonnes of useable soil which filled planters built from upcycled materials to grow more food that went back into the production kitchen to create delicious things to eat. This is an example of a closed-loop system where the inputs create outputs, and the outputs feed the inputs.

The project showed how other food businesses working together can take waste and create something good from it.

Their ‘open source’ policy for sharing knowledge and findings from the project with others - from community groups to corporate businesses, even the Irish Naval Service – has meant urban soil projects are now cropping up all over the country.

Carol Barrett, of multi-award-winning Dunmore House Hotel in Clonakilty, spoke about the collective commitment for effective waste separation in kitchens, souring the best local ingredients and working to ensure nothing is wasted, and their three acres of soon-to-be organic certified kitchen gardens.

Sustainability, Barrett says, is who they are. “It’s not just about the food,” she says; not a gimmick or a sales pitch, but an inherent part of how they provide their whole service as a four-star family-run hotel.

From the welcome to every bite of food served to their guests, a sustainable mindset runs through. 

“Sustainability is not a choice anymore,” says Barrett.

She spoke of their participation in the Voice Ireland multi-year Waste Not, Want Not project which aims to Clonakilty in becoming the first Zero Waste town in Ireland.

Within that project, Dunmore House Hotel was asked to spearhead a sub-group to encourage other local venues to commit to creating a sustainable wedding service.

Barrett says they are happy to be part of the initiative, but as sustainability is something the hotel and all its staff live every day, they don’t promote a different tier of wedding service because sustainability is simply built in.

The discussions highlighted that, whether a business is a venue, a producer or a redistributor of excess produce, while working hard to reduce food waste happening, businesses can also use their focus on sustainability as a showcase for best practice to increase revenue.

During the conference, the annual Visit Cork Green Award was announced, with Old Head Golf Links picking up the accolade in recognition of its commitment to making sustainability improvements, particularly around waste management.

In one year, the quantity of general waste reduced from 42,375kg in 2023 to 27,666kg in 2024, with 14,629kg of waste diverted to the brown compost bin instead of the general waste, and citing a whole-team effort in making the positive impact.

For a venue like this, located in a wild and natural landscape setting, the spectre of waste is one that is vitally important to act on.

In the area of business and conference tourism, this is something other non-food businesses are homing in on to fulfill their own Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) commitments.

Jac Callan, Sustainability and Impact Manager at Visit Belfast, ed in via Zoom link to talk about the positive impact of their community-based food waste and redistribution project, ‘Changing The Menu For Good’.

What started as a response to a 125% increase in food poverty in post-covid Belfast has developed into a response from the business tourism sector to reduce food waste, raising awareness of food waste and food poverty, and working with stakeholders to actively find solutions that work on a per case, business or client basis.

The impetus, said Callan, was facing up to the uncomfortable reality that visitors to Belfast were treated better with food than many of its own residents who were going hungry.

“How do we deal with abundance at events, knowing that abundance leads to food waste?” asked Callan.

The solution to the problem was found in a corporate social responsibility project, Changing The Menu for Good.

The project is framed as a ‘multiple problem-solver’ by meeting the needs of companies looking for more sustainable and responsible events while contributing to the wellbeing of local communities and positioning Belfast as a responsible tourism destination.

In two years, £72,000 (equivalent to 59,000 meals or 120 volunteer hours) has been raised to Belfast-based outreach projects such as The People’s Kitchen, Social Supermarkets and Food Banks.

This was achieved by developing four ways to the project including ‘4th course’, which involves donating the cost of a fourth course at gala dinners to a community kitchen or food bank.

It’s a template for change that’s easy to replicate across Cork, creating a net benefit to the sustainable reputation of its city and county overall in the most unlikely of places: tourism.

While these initiatives are aimed at the business tourism sector in Cork, there is also a grander plan taking shape for Cork to become World Gastronomic Capital in 2030, following in the footsteps of other food tourism hotspots, such as Barcelona.

A strong performance on sustainability – from food waste reduction initiatives, using food to the vulnerable in our communities, or corporate social responsibility programmes – is as essential to Cork’s being named a World Gastronomic Capital as the food itself.

Definitely food for thought.