Here's a special Earth Day celebration: today Antica Pesa restaurant launches its new sustainability initiative. The project, a forest of 1000 trees in six countries called Antica Pesa Forest kicks off their upcoming centennial celebration in 2022.
Antica Pesa is a critically acclaimed Roman restaurant that has been owned and operated by the Panella family since 1922 in Trastevere, Rome, and, since 2012, in Williamsburg, Brooklyn. Over the past four generations, the Panella family continues to pay homage to their homeland by reworking traditional recipes from Roman cuisine with a nod to modern trends and utilizing single-origin seasonal products. With an emphasis on sustainability and the future of hospitality, Antica Pesa continues to evolve their social mission with a commitment to a greener environment for future generations who will continue to carry on their legacy.
Francesco Panella and chef Emanuele Baldassini (ph Evan Sung)
As a way to embark upon their centenary year of service Antica Pesa has partnered with Treedom to debut “Antica Pesa Forest.” Treedom is the first website platform that allows trees to be planted remotely, geolocated, and photographed, with regular updates about each tree posted in an online tree diary. Antica Pesa’s Forest is a personalized collection beginning with 1,000 trees planted in six countries: 300 Cocoa trees in Cameroon, 250 Coffee trees in Colombia, 150 Guava trees in Tanzania, 100 Orange trees in Haiti, 100 Lime trees in Nepal, and 100 Avocado trees in Kenya.
100 trees in Antica Pesa’s Forest will be donated to commemorate 100 important moments from their 100-year history, and the other 900 trees from this innovative sustainability initiative will be gifted to their extended family, the beloved guests who join them in Rome and Brooklyn. The gifted trees will be delivered digitally through QR codes, or manually with customized pop-up cards, which automatically pair online to Antica Pesa’s Forest page. Tree gift recipients are given a choice of which tree species to adopt, and the option to give their new tree a personalized name that can be viewed and followed along with the community of growing trees within Antica Pesa’s Forest.
The mission of Antica Pesa’s Forest is to create a lasting bond between people while taking action to protect the environment and the communities that inhabit it. The trees bring environmental benefits (offsetting CO2 emissions, supporting biodiversity, combating soil erosion and deforestation), as well as social benefits (training, food security, empowerment, and income) as Treedom is a social enterprise that engages smallholder farmers in developing countries who plant and take care of the trees within the forest. Antica Pesa is adding this new initiative alongside the ongoing company sustainability efforts such as purchasing local items for their seasonal menus, eliminating single-use paper and plastic, and supporting local farmers, artisans, and suppliers with aligned ethos.
Antica Pesa’s Forest initiative aims to create new business and sustainability models for the hospitality sector. Alongside this new project owner Francesco Panella has launched an educational challenge for the students of John Cabot University in Rome entitled “Hospitality for the Future” to enable for the first time a collaboration between a restaurant and international University in a creative and innovative way to create a sustainable hospitality model with the students’ cooperation. Over the course of the challenge, students from the prestigious international University will present projects focused on the future of the restaurant industry with technology and sustainability being the key concepts for the creation of new and advanced business models that are also environmentally responsible. Students in the challenge will compete to create the best projects to make a sustainable restaurant, involve stakeholders, and communicate their positive messages through various channels.
Francesco Panella
Says Francesco Panella, “Young people are our main target, the new consumers, and we want them to give us ideas, answers, and solutions. I’m very happy and enthusiastic about carrying out this project with John Cabot University. Students are the future, the source of hope for a sustainable and ethical life. For this reason, the best projects will be implemented in my restaurants, which have always been environmentally conscious, and geared towards development and innovation. Our family has adopted a forest through the Treedom platform and we want to give students the motivation to win this new challenge with the opportunity to take care of a gifted tree that we will donate to them, as a symbol of rebirth, growth, and the future.”