Deliver a quality food and drink experience

Use local produce

Customers want to find, taste and enjoy the best local produce. It helps them to feel a connection with the area and celebrates Scottish identity and culture. Offering them a taste of local and traditional food and drink is an opportunity they may not get elsewhere.

Visitors to Scotland are prepared to pay more for products with provenance, potentially resulting in higher spending. Domestic visitors are also interested in local produce - four in five Scots would like to be able to buy more food and drink produced in Scotland.

Discover how to make local produce and suppliers an integral part of your food and drink business.

Make more from scratch

Create as many products and dishes from scratch as possible in your own kitchen. This helps you know the quality and ensure local and seasonal ingredients are used.

It also leads to more authentic stories – your staff can get to know what you’re serving and why and share that knowledge with the customers.

Review your menus

Start by building dishes and menus around the local produce available through suppliers. This will put the produce front and centre, rather than integrating touches into an existing menu.

Change the menus regularly

Local produce availability will change regularly, so your menu should reflect that. Check out our seasonal calendar to see what’s available when, and what kind of produce you can use each week, month or season.

Look at VisitScotland’s seasonal food calendar for ideas.

Follow health and nutrition advice

Check out the current recommendations for a healthy and balanced diet that celebrates Scotland's larder with the Scottish Eatwell Guide. It highlights the proportions of fruit and vegetables, carbohydrate foods, meat, dairy and more that we should all have in our diet.

Read more about the Scottish Eatwell Guide.

This is a great time to review the sustainability of your business and how you can incorporate sustainable practices.

For existing businesses, conduct an audit to identify areas of waste, and research options to reduce, reuse and recycle. Remember to share how you’re improving your sustainability with staff, other businesses and your customers as part of the marketing around your new experience.

Businesses should review or consider the sustainability of:

• suppliers and produce
• stock levels and storage
• waste
• energy
• water
• disposable equipment
• cleaning products
• materials
• packaging and delivery
• staff
• customers

Changes you could make include reducing:

• food miles by buying produce locally
• waste by planning menus and collecting pre-orders
• costs by using seasonal produce

You can find tips and case studies for the food and drink sector to reach net zero.

With any experience, it’s important to gather feedback quickly to see if it delivers for customers or there are any improvements you could make.

Look at ways to gather feedback including sending out a customer survey or encouraging customer reviews on social media or websites.

Think about setting some milestones or targets so you can track your performance and results over time.

Read more about setting targets and benchmarks for your business.

You can also think about how to create photo opportunities for customers to share on social media. This could become another metric for your business and be a sign of positive feedback.