Best Focus on Local Ingredients

This category recognizes those chefs or foodservice businesses using creativity and innovation to make local ingredients the star of their menu, while preserving and promoting the local culinary culture. The use of local ingredients is important on many levels, such as preserving local culture, driving local economic development and helping to protect our planet’s unique biodiversity. These goals can be achieved in many different ways, although there just one sector of our industry has more potential to do so than any others: foodservice. Chefs and restaurant owners have the power to choose what they put on their menus, and the stories they tell around it.