Meliá Chiang Mai cuts carbon footprint through the belly

Set to open on April 8 on Charoen Prathet Road in the heart of Chiang Mai, the 260-key Meliá Chiang Mai will offer a 360° Cuisine concept that embraces sustainability and promotes healthy eating.

Executive chef Suksant Chutinthratip will craft dishes that use produce from the hotel’s organic farm, allowing the hotel to shrink its carbon footprint from F&B consumption.

Meliá Chiang Mai will offer a 360° Cuisine concept that embraces sustainability and promotes healthy eating

Suksant’s emphasis on “thoughtful cooking”, which minimises food waste by using as much of each and every ingredient as possible, is encapsulated in signature 360° Cuisine dishes.

He explained: “For khao khaab hor goong, for example, we use prawn shells, prawn heads and garden herb stems for our stock base to poach the prawns, and lemon zest as part of the sauce to give a disarming citrus fragrance and flavour, before the leftover cooking oil is sent to be recycled into biodiesel.”

“Our farm-to-plate efforts, sourcing organic produce that travels only a short distance to our hotel and using every part of each ingredient we can – roots, leaves, stems, stalks and more – come full circle with plate-to-farm, whereby we return food waste back to the farm as fertiliser in a truly 360° concept,” Suksant detailed.

In a bid to make communities and the overall food system more resilient, the hotel’s kitchen has partnered with with ORI9IN The Gourmet Farm, a 350-acre gourmet organic farm located in nearby San Sai District, and is working closely with local farmers to help them improve sustainability and encourage ethical production. This includes import substitution, growing of produce and specialised ingredients, like padrón pepper, that would otherwise need to be imported from Spain for Meliá’s Mediterranean cuisine.

Guests are also encouraged to visit the ORI9IN farm to meet local farmers and learn more about sustainable farming.

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